Market Intelligence 

What the register is

Every property transaction in Dubai — every sale, mortgage registration and transfer — is registered with the Dubai Land Department, and the Department publishes that register as open data. It is the primary record of the market: not a survey, not an estimate, but the transactions themselves, and it is the same raw feed many of the analytics platforms further down this page refine into their own products. The index above is computed directly from the register, transaction by transaction, with nothing modelled and nothing bought in, and it reads the register as at 2 September 2026.

Existing property, not off-plan

The register records two different markets, and it flags which is which. Off-plan sales are registered when a developer sells a unit that is not yet built; everything else is registered against existing, completed property. Off-plan runs at roughly three times the volume and prices tomorrow’s building at tomorrow’s money, so an index that blends the two moves whenever the launch calendar moves, not when the market does. The index above therefore reads registered sales of existing property only — the price of what is actually standing.

One honest limit, because the label depends on it. That flag is the only cut the register supports: off-plan or existing. It does not separate a developer’s first sale of a finished unit from an owner-to-owner resale of the same unit — both register as existing property, and both are in these medians. So this is published as a sale register read on existing stock, not as a resale index, and never as a primary-versus-secondary split. The data cannot draw that line, so neither do we.

Sales, not mortgages or gifts

Alongside sales, the register carries mortgage registrations and gift transfers against existing property — more than fifty thousand rows over the period charted above. The amount recorded on those rows is a valuation or a nominal figure, not a price a buyer paid, and leaving them in would drag every month’s median roughly 12% lower. The index reads sales only.

Why land is excluded

A plot’s price per square foot is measured over land area; a building’s is measured over built area. They are different units, and the land rows also carry the register’s wildest outliers. Mixing them into one series would measure two different things at once, so the index covers apartments, villas and townhouses, offices, shops and whole buildings — never plots.

How the segments are drawn

Segments follow the register’s property sub-type: apartments are units registered as flats, villas and townhouses are villa registrations, and offices and retail are units registered as offices or shops — the same definition as our commercial price index, so the two publications agree. The register’s separate “usage” field is not used, because it is unreliable: over the charted period it tags more than four thousand offices as residential.

One sale, counted once

The register publishes the same sale under two different transaction-number formats across its bulk and daily loads, so the transaction number alone cannot be used to spot a repeat. Every row is instead matched on the transaction number’s underlying components — procedure, group, serial and year — so a sale that appears in both loads is counted once, keeping the bulk-load row’s own details. The transaction counts shown in the chart’s readout are these de-duplicated sales.

Why medians, and the 1% trim

Each point is the median price per square foot for its month — the middle of what actually traded — after trimming the top and bottom 1% of that month’s distribution, because the register’s extreme tails include data-entry noise. A median is robust to outliers in a way an average is not, but it still moves with the mix of what sold as well as with price: a month heavy in prime stock reads higher even if no individual building repriced. Read it as market context, not as a valuation of any one property.

Complete months and the provisional tail

The series starts at the first complete month of register coverage, May 2025, and each segment’s index is rebased so that its May 2025 median equals 100 — which is why every line starts at the same point and can be compared by eye. The current month is included while it is still filling, drawn dashed and marked provisional in the readout, and is not treated as settled until it is complete.