Methodology, version 1.0

What counts as a transaction

Everything on this site comes from transactions registered with the Dubai Land Department. A transaction enters our tables when DLD publishes it in open data; nothing is added from listings, brokers or surveys.

DLD registers three different things, and we never add them together:

Sales

a transfer of ownership for a price. Everything we call a “price” on this site is a sale.

Mortgages

a loan secured against a property. The registered amount is the size of the loan, not the price of the home, and loan-to-value cannot be derived from it because the open registry does not link a mortgage to the sale of the same unit.

Gifts

a transfer without a market price, usually within a family. Counted, never priced.

Over the whole registry we hold 501 400 registrations: 398 566 sales, 83 399 mortgages and 19 435 gifts.

Medians, never means

Every central value on this site is a median, and it is published with the interquartile range — the middle 50% of transactions. Dubai's price distribution has a long right tail: a single penthouse can move a community's mean by double digits while the typical transaction has not moved at all. The IQR is shown on every chart as a shaded band, so the spread is visible rather than hidden inside one number.

Price per square foot

Price per square foot is the registered sale amount divided by the registered area, converted from square metres at 10.7639 sqft per sqm. DLD records area in square metres; we publish both.

Only built homes are included: apartments, villas, hotel apartments and stacked townhouses. Land plots and sales of whole buildings are excluded from price per square foot because a plot price per foot and a flat price per foot are not the same measurement — but those transactions are still counted in transaction totals.

Outlier trimming

Two filters run before any median is computed, and both are recomputed on every build rather than frozen into a constant.

1. Absolute sanity bounds. A sale amount outside AED 50 000–5 000 000 000, an area outside 15–100 000 sqm, or a price per square foot outside AED 100–20 000 is excluded from price statistics.
2. Percentile trimming. Within each combination of year, property subtype and registration type, values below the 1st and above the 99th percentile are excluded from medians.

Trimmed rows are excluded from medians but still counted in transaction counts. That is deliberate: the count is a fact about the registry, the median is a description of the typical deal.

The window, and why the current month is missing

Headline figures use a trailing 12 complete months. The current window is Sep 2025 – Aug 2026. Data reaches 7 Sep 2026, but September 2026 is excluded from every trend and every headline number.

The reason is registration lag: a transaction is registered days or weeks after it is agreed, and DLD keeps adding to a month long after it ends. A fresh month therefore always looks like a collapse, and anyone who plots it unadjusted publishes a crash that never happened. Year-on-year comparisons use the same 12-month window shifted back a year, so both sides of the comparison are equally complete.

Sample thresholds

A median from four transactions is not a market, it is an anecdote with decimal places. So:

• fewer than 5 records — no figure is published at all, and the page says “insufficient data”;
• 5–19 records — the figure is published with a visible “low sample” mark;
• 20 or more — published normally.

The same thresholds decide whether an entity gets a page at all: a community or DLD area needs 20 registered sales in the window, a project 50, a developer 50. Pages without their own numbers are not created.

Rents

Rents come from Ejari, the emirate's tenancy contract registry. We use the registered annual amount of single-property contracts; contracts covering several units at once are excluded because their total is not the rent of a home. We hold 2 171 850 contracts registered since 2023.

Ejari records signed contracts, not asking rents, and it includes renewals. Renewals are constrained by the RERA rent cap, so a market median that mixes them sits below what a new tenant would be quoted today. Where the split matters we show it.

Gross rental yield

Gross yield is the median registered annual rent for a place divided by the median registered sale price of a ready home in the same place. Off-plan sales are excluded from the denominator, because a home that does not exist yet earns no rent.

A yield is published only when all three conditions hold: at least 15 rental contracts, at least 15 ready-home sales, and a result between 2.0% and 15.0%. Outside that corridor the inputs are almost always mismatched populations rather than a real return, so nothing is shown.

It is gross. Service charges (roughly 10–25 AED per square foot a year in Dubai), vacancy, agency and management fees, DLD transfer costs and any financing are not deducted. A net figure is materially lower and depends on the specific property.

Construction progress and handover dates

The completion percentage is the figure recorded at the project's last DLD technical inspection. It is measured, not estimated — but inspections are irregular, so an unchanged percentage between two dates does not mean construction has stopped. The declared completion date is a registry field maintained by the developer through DLD, not a delivery commitment, and it is revised over the life of a project.

Project registry data comes from the Mashrooi project register. Projects are matched to transactions by DLD project number and never by name: sub-projects are commonly registered as “Master community — Name”, and matching on names silently merges different developments.

Areas, communities and names

DLD records every transaction against an administrative area — “Marsa Dubai”, not “Dubai Marina”. It separately records a master project, which is the name people actually use. Both are published: /areas/ uses the administrative names, /communities/ uses the master-project names, and each page lists the other. Around 15% of sales carry no master project and appear only under their administrative area.

Where an administrative area maps essentially one-to-one onto a single community, we do not publish both pages: the area links straight to the community rather than repeating the same numbers under a second name.

Days with no registrations

The registry closes on UAE public holidays. Those days show zero transactions, and a chart drawn naively turns them into crashes. Months are never rescaled for working days — instead, months with too few records to meet the sample threshold are left blank on charts rather than joined by a straight line through empty space.

Provenance labels

Every field on this site belongs to exactly one class, and classes are never mixed inside a single number:

DLD verified

from Dubai Land Department open data — registered transactions, Ejari contracts, the project register and its inspections.

Developer supplied

declared by a developer through a DLD registry field, such as declared project value or declared completion date.

Continental Club inventory

from Continental Club Property's own records. Nothing on the site carries this label today; when it appears it will be labelled on the number itself.

Limitations — what this data cannot tell you

Stated plainly, because a statistics site that only lists its strengths is advertising:

• Asking prices are invisible. Registered prices are the end of a negotiation, not the start of one.
• Quality within a place is invisible. A sea-view tower and the block behind it register in the same area under the same name.
• Costs are outside the price. Service charges, chiller, commission, DLD transfer fees and mortgage costs are not in any figure here.
• Off-plan prices are payment plans. In communities where most sales are off-plan, the median describes contracts on unbuilt homes.
• Unit mix drives medians. A community full of studios shows a low median price and a high price per square foot; neither says it is cheap or expensive.
• Recent weeks are incomplete and stay that way for a while.
• We are a brokerage. That is disclosed on /about. The defence against it is this page: every rule is written down and every number can be reproduced from public data.

Version history

v1.0 — 2026-09-09. First published version.

When a rule changes, the version and date change with it and the change is described here. Figures already published under an older version are recomputed on the next build; we do not keep two sets of rules alive at once.