A portal listing shows what a seller hopes to achieve. DLD's register shows what a buyer actually paid, because under Law No. (7) of 2006 Concerning Real Property Registration in the Emirate of Dubai, every legal transfer of ownership must be entered in the Property Register to take effect. The scale of that record is substantial: DLD reported 718,160 real estate procedures in the first quarter of 2026 alone, including 60,303 individual real estate transactions worth a combined AED 252 billion, a 31% year-on-year increase in value. Commentary elsewhere on this site has noted a meaningful gap between typical asking prices and what actually gets registered — see our guide to valuing a property before selling for the current estimate of that gap. The point for this guide is simpler: an asking price is a negotiating position; a registered transaction is a fact.
Several DLD-linked sources cover different angles of the same underlying register:
- Dubai REST — DLD's own app, offering a personal transaction history for anything you own, plus market-comparison and price-trend views for a chosen building or community.
- DLD's Real Estate Transactions e-service (dubailand.gov.ae) — a public look-up for registered transaction records.
- DLD's Real Estate Data (Open Data) portal — downloadable datasets across roughly eight categories, including transaction, rent, project, valuation, land, unit, building and broker details, plus an API Gateway for programmatic access.
- DLD's Indexes hub — home to Mo'asher and the Service Charge Index, covered below.
- Dubai Pulse — Digital Dubai's open-data platform, hosting a DLD transactions dataset covering sales, mortgages, inheritance, merges and separations. This dataset's link has pointed toward a differently branded platform ('data.dubai'), while Dubai Pulse's own site also remains live; confirm which is current before treating either as a fixed reference.
- Third-party dashboards built on the same underlying DLD data — tools such as DXBinteract visualise DLD-sourced figures. These are privately operated products, in DXBinteract's case built by a Dubai brokerage under a stated collaboration with DLD, not DLD's own infrastructure; useful for a quick visual read, but cross-check anything transaction-critical against DLD's own systems directly.
A registered transaction record looks straightforward until you rely on it for a real decision. In plain terms:
| What you will see | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Registration date | The date the transfer was recorded with DLD, not necessarily the date a price was first agreed | A recently registered price reflects current conditions more closely than an older one |
| Procedure type | Whether the registration is a Sale, Mortgage, Gift or similar | Only a genuine sale is a true price comparable; other procedure types can reflect financing or related-party value |
| Property type | Land, Building or Unit, then a sub-type such as Villa, Apartment or Office | Filters out non-comparable asset classes before you look at price |
| Registration status | Off-Plan or Existing (ready) | Off-plan and ready stock price on different logics; blending them distorts an average, covered further below |
| Area, project and building | DLD's location hierarchy | The single most important filter for a genuine comparable |
| Unit type / rooms | Studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and so on | Matches like-for-like configuration |
| Procedure area | The registered size, in square metres | Converts to price per square foot; check whether the figure is built-up or net area |
| Transaction value (AED) | The registered price | The numerator for price per square foot |
| Step | What you do | What it protects against |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Set the filter | Start with the same building; widen to the same immediate micro-location only if there are too few transactions | Comparing unlike buildings or unlike locations |
| 2. Match configuration | Same unit type, room count, and a similar floor band in a tall building | Comparing a studio against a two-bedroom, or a low floor against a penthouse |
| 3. Set a recent window | A commonly used starting point is the last 90 days for a specific building or community, widened only if too few transactions exist | Relying on a stale price from a different market condition |
| 4. Separate off-plan from ready | Never blend the two into a single average | Off-plan and ready stock pricing on different logics, discussed below |
| 5. Convert consistently | Use the same unit (square metres or square feet) and the same area basis (built-up or net) throughout | Silent unit-conversion or area-basis errors |
| 6. Look at the range, not just the mean | Check the spread and the median alongside any average | A skewed outlier making a thin dataset look more precise than it is |
| 7. Cross-check the direction | Compare your narrow comparable set against Mo'asher's broader trend for the same segment | A narrow sample disagreeing sharply with the wider market, without you noticing |
Mo'asher is DLD's official sales and rental price index, developed jointly with Property Finder using a hedonic-regression methodology with a base year of 2012, and published on a recurring basis covering both the apartment and villa or townhouse segments. Its value is directional: it tells you whether prices in a given segment are broadly rising, falling or flat, which is useful context a single comparable cannot provide on its own. It is not designed, and should not be used, as a substitute for valuing an individual unit — a distinction DLD itself draws around how its published indices should be used. The specific edition and methodology detail referenced here should be re-checked at source before being cited to a client, since index methodology can be revised between editions.
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- Blending built-up area (BUA) with net or carpet area without checking which basis a given figure uses, which silently distorts a price-per-square-foot comparison. No standard percentage for that gap is confirmed here; check the actual floor plan rather than assume one.
- Mixing square metres and square feet without converting consistently (1 sqm is approximately 10.764 sqft), especially when pulling figures from more than one source.
- Blending off-plan and ready transactions into one average, when the two typically price on different logics — payment plan structure and completion risk for off-plan, immediate occupancy and condition for ready stock.
- Treating a thin sample as a firm benchmark, particularly in lower-volume communities or unusual unit types, where a handful of transactions can swing an average sharply.
- Assuming every registered value reflects an arm's-length sale, when a portion of registrations are mortgages, gifts or related-party transfers rather than genuine market transactions.
- Using a stale or overly wide time window instead of a recent one, which can hide a shift already visible in more recent registrations.
- Comparing price per square foot alone, without adjusting for floor level, view, condition, tenancy status or service-charge burden.
- Confusing an index's direction with a specific unit's value — Mo'asher can be rising while a specific unit, building or floor underperforms the average, or the reverse.
Treat registered transaction data as a first-pass triage tool, not a substitute for formal accreditation. For anything that needs to stand up beyond an initial pricing conversation — a mortgage application, a probate matter, a disputed price — a RICS-standard or DLD-accredited valuer remains the reference point; our guide to valuing a property before selling sets out that process. Combine transaction data with DLD's Service Charge Index for a true net-of-charges comparison between two otherwise similar units, and with rental data for an investor weighing yield against comparable sale prices. Used this way, the data is a genuine negotiating tool for either side of a transaction, grounded in what has actually been registered rather than what a portal or a brochure suggests.
We pull and interpret this exact data — DLD-registered comparables, Mo'asher's directional trend, and Mollak-benchmarked service charges — as standard groundwork before presenting a property or a price recommendation to an investor, rather than quoting a portal average. Talk to us before you set an asking price or make an offer on a specific Dubai property.
This guide is provided for general information only and is not legal, financial, or investment advice. Registered data, published indices and platform names referenced here reflect the position as at July 2026; always pull current figures directly from Dubai REST, dubailand.gov.ae or a qualified valuer before relying on them for an actual transaction.
In closing
Key Takeaways
- Dubai Land Department registers every legal property transfer in the emirate, and a substantial share of that record — individual transactions and the indices built from them — is published free, through Dubai REST, dubailand.gov.ae, and the Dubai Pulse open-data platform.
- Mo'asher, DLD's official price index produced jointly with Property Finder, is not the same thing as a comparable sale — it is a hedonic-regression index tracking the broader sales and rental market, explicitly a directional benchmark rather than a substitute for valuing a specific unit.
- Registered transaction value is not automatically market value — DLD's own records distinguish a sale from a mortgage, gift or inheritance transfer, and only genuine arm's-length sales are true price comparables.
- DLD records size in square metres; the market talks in price per square foot — a straightforward conversion (1 sqm is approximately 10.764 sqft), but a genuinely common source of error when figures from different sources are compared without checking the units.
- A single area-wide average masks more than it reveals — off-plan and ready stock, and even units of the same configuration in different buildings, can trade at a wide enough spread in price per square foot to make an unfiltered average close to meaningless for a specific unit.
- A genuine comparable set is built by filtering, not by averaging everything in a community — the same building or immediate micro-location, the same unit type, a recent window, and a consistent off-plan-versus-ready split, before price per square foot becomes a meaningful number.
- This data supports a decision; it does not replace a formal valuation — a RICS-standard or DLD-accredited valuer remains the reference point for a mortgage or a disputed price. See our guide to valuing a property before selling for how the two fit together.
This guide explains how to find and read Dubai's registered property transaction data — through Dubai REST, DLD's own e-services, Mo'asher and the Dubai Pulse open-data platform — to research price history, comparables, price per square foot and market trends before buying or selling. It is a methodology for reading the data correctly, not a current data dump; figures move constantly, and specific numbers should always be pulled fresh at the time of a real decision.
Frequently asked questions
0501Is DLD's transaction data free to access?
Yes. Dubai REST, DLD's Real Estate Transactions e-service, and the Real Estate Data open-data portal are all free to use. Mo'asher's published index reports and Dubai Pulse's open datasets are also free to view and download.
02Why does a comparable search sometimes turn up almost no matching transactions?
Dubai's registered-sales data is genuinely thin at the level of a single building, floor band and unit type over a short window, especially outside high-volume communities. Widen the time window or the geographic radius before concluding there is no data, and treat a very small sample with proportionate caution rather than as a firm benchmark.
03Is Mo'asher the same as an official Dubai house-price index I can quote for a valuation?
Mo'asher is DLD's own published sales and rental price index, produced jointly with Property Finder using a hedonic-regression methodology. It is a genuine directional benchmark for the market or a segment, not a substitute for a valuation of a specific unit. See our guide to valuing a property before selling for how the two fit together.
04Does a higher registered transaction value always mean a genuine market sale?
No. DLD's own records distinguish sale registrations from other procedure types such as mortgages, gifts and inheritance transfers. A share of registered transfers reflect financing or related-party arrangements rather than an arm's-length sale, which is one reason a single data point should not be read in isolation.
05Can I use this data instead of hiring a valuer?
For a first-pass read on pricing and comparables, yes. For anything that needs to stand up formally — a mortgage application, a dispute, a probate matter — a RICS-standard or DLD-accredited valuation remains the reference point; registered transaction data supports that process, it does not replace it.
Next step
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Tell us what you are weighing up — a building, a project, an area, or a rule you need to get right — and we will come back with the specifics that apply to it.
Updated 10 July 2026 by Mitchell's Commercial Real Estate. Market figures quoted reflect the data available at that date.
