Dubai Property Index

How the numbers are built

Where the data comes from

Sales run through 2026-09-14. The whole site was rebuilt on 2026-09-23.

What counts as a sale

One row per transaction the Land Department registered. Off-plan means DLD’s own pre-registration procedure, plus “Delayed Sell”, which is the same primary-market event registered late. Everything else is a resale. Rows whose date is missing, before 1990 or in the future are dropped; DLD ships a handful of those with Hijri-calendar artefacts.

Price per square foot

Restricted to residential flats and villas that pass every DLD quality check. Land trades on plot area at a tenth the rate, and whole buildings price wholesale, so both are excluded. Shops, offices and hotel units sit inside DLD’s “Unit” type and are excluded by usage. Leaving either restriction out is the usual way to get a number that looks plausible and is quietly wrong.

The headline figure on the front page is a median. Everywhere a filter is applied, the figure is the value-weighted average across the selection, because a median cannot be rolled up from pre-aggregated cells. Both are labelled where they appear.

Grouping developers

DLD registers developers as legal entities, and the large names run dozens of special-purpose companies. Entities are collapsed into one brand by brand words in the entity name first, then by the corporate email or website domain the entity gave DLD. Free-mail and law-firm domains never group anything. Where a project’s developer cannot be resolved it sits in Unattributed, currently 1% of off-plan sales.

Areas and the map

Area names are DLD’s cadastral names, not the marketing names. “Al Barsha South Fourth” is what people call Jumeirah Village Circle; both are shown. Map points are the median surveyed coordinate of the registered projects in that area, taken from the project registry. 60 of 199 areas have one, covering 92% of transactions; the rest are older neighbourhoods with no registered project, and they appear in the tables but not on the map.

Pictures

Every picture on this site comes out of the same government record as the numbers. Developer marks and project images are the ones each developer filed with the Dubai Land Department and DLD publishes in its Dubai Projects book; they are mirrored here rather than hotlinked. A project image is the developer’s own render, not a photograph of a finished building, and it is labelled that way wherever it appears. Roughly a third of the filed logo URLs and half the filed project images are dead or permission-denied at source, so a page with no picture is a gap in the register, not an oversight. Nothing here is stock photography and no image is chosen by matching a place name.

Rents

Not loaded yet. The bulk Ejari rent-contract file sits behind a data.dubai account, so it cannot be fetched anonymously the way the sales file can. The pipeline reads one the moment it is dropped in, and the rent filters appear then. Nothing on this site estimates a rent.

Known limits

  • Registered prices, not asking prices. A registration lags the deal.
  • Bedroom count is missing on a meaningful share of older rows.
  • Project, building and master-community names are free text as registered, with real spelling variation.
  • The most recent month is always partial; charts and headline figures use the last month DLD has finished.
  • Nothing here is investment advice, and no figure on this site is a valuation.

Corrections

If a developer is grouped wrongly, or a project is attributed to the wrong entity, say so and it gets fixed in the next build. The grouping rules are a table, not a model.