Commercial

Resale Commercial Property in Dubai

Dubai's secondary commercial market — offices, retail units and warehouses resold by their existing owners, ready to inspect, and transferable without waiting for a handover.

Most of the commercial property advertised in Dubai has never been used. It is sold from a plan, on a payment schedule, and it becomes yours on a handover date some distance in the future. That is the primary market, and it is what our commercial property listings cover — new offices, retail units and mixed-use space bought directly from the developer.

This page is the other market. Secondary — or resale — stock is a unit that already exists and already has an owner. Somebody bought it, took the title deed, and is now selling it on. The building is standing, the floor is finished, the service charge has a history, and in a good number of cases there is a tenant in occupation paying rent under a registered lease. You are not buying a promise about a building; you are buying a building, from the person whose name is currently on the register.

The two markets are not better and worse versions of each other. They answer different questions. An investor who wants the lowest entry price and can wait three years for a handover is a primary-market buyer. A business that needs a fitted office this quarter, or an investor who wants the rent to start on the day the transfer completes, is a secondary-market buyer. Most of the people we work with look at both, which is why the two sets of listings sit beside each other in the menu rather than one replacing the other.

If you have not bought on this side of the market before, our step-by-step guide to buying a resale property in Dubai walks the process through from offer to transfer. What follows here is the commercial-specific part: what changes about inspection, income, registration, tax and cost when the seller is an owner rather than a developer.

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On the market

Resale commercial listings

Secondary-market instructions we are marketing appear here as soon as they are published.

No resale listings are published on this page yet.

We are preparing the first set of secondary-market instructions. Rather than show you an empty grid or a sample unit, this page will stay as it is until there are real listings to put on it — everything above and below is about the market itself, and it is accurate whether we are marketing one unit or fifty.

In the meantime, three places that do have stock on them today:

Commercial property deals — the primary market: new offices, retail and mixed-use units bought from the developer, with office and retail broken out separately.
Distress deals — motivated sellers and below-market resale opportunities, which is secondary stock sourced a different way.
Commercial buildings — the building-by-building directory, if you know the tower you want to be in before you know the unit.

If you already know what you are looking for, tell us and we will come back when it comes up.

Two markets

Buying from a developer, or buying from an owner

The same asset classes, reached two different ways. Most buyers we work with look at both before they decide.

Primary marketCommercial Property DealsCurated commercial property listings across Dubai — offices, retail and mixed-use units.View the primary market →Secondary marketCommercial Resale ListingsDubai's secondary commercial market — offices, retail units and warehouses resold by their existing owners, ready to inspect, and transferable without waiting for a handover.See the resale directory →

Before you buy

What buying resale commercial property in Dubai actually involves

You can inspect the exact thing you are buying

This is the difference that matters most, and it is the one that is easiest to underrate until a handover goes wrong. A resale unit can be walked before you commit. You can see the floor plate rather than a rendering of it, measure the usable area against the area on the title deed, look at the condition of the fit-out, check the ceiling height against your racking or your air-conditioning plan, count the parking bays, and stand in the lobby at nine in the morning to see what the building is actually like when it is full.

You can also check the unit's record before you offer on it. The Dubai Land Department publishes a free per-plot Property Status Enquiry, and it returns considerably more than a freehold flag. As our ownership and freehold guide sets out, the enquiry shows property blocking — including the blocking authority, the date and the stated reason — Dubai Municipality violations with their date, type and status, active rental dispute cases, restrained information, and a title deed explanation with the underlying land record. A unit that is blocked, in dispute or carrying an open municipality violation is a very different proposition from one that is clean, and on a resale purchase you can find that out before you negotiate rather than after.

It may already be producing income

An off-plan purchase produces nothing until the building is finished and a tenant is found. A tenanted resale unit produces rent from the day the transfer registers, because the lease transfers with the property.

Where a unit on this page is tenanted, we state it, and we state the contractual rent and where that figure comes from — the tenancy contract, sighted and dated. We do not publish a yield. A yield is a division sum, and the number underneath it moves with the price you actually agree, the service charge in the year you actually own it, and any vacancy between one tenant leaving and the next arriving. If you want to model it, put your own numbers into the rental yield calculator and use ours as inputs rather than as conclusions.

One statutory point that catches owners of tenanted commercial units by surprise: under Article 16 of Law No. 6 of 2019, a commercial landlord stays liable to the management entity for the service charge even where the lease puts that cost on the tenant and the tenant then defaults. The obligation to the owners' association does not move with the contractual arrangement. Our RERA, Ejari and Oqood guide sets out that provision alongside the registration duties that apply to every commercial lease in the emirate.

The title transfers now, not on a handover date

In the primary market an off-plan unit is entered in the Interim Property Register through Oqood, and it stays there until the developer receives the completion certificate and the unit is moved into the Property Register in the buyer's name. That conversion is a duty on the developer under Article 8 of Law No. 13 of 2008, and the Land Department has its own power to make the entry — but it happens on the project's timetable, not on yours.

A resale purchase skips that entire mechanism. The unit is already on the Property Register, and the transaction is the re-registration of it at a Registration Trustee office. Registration is not administrative tidying: Article 9 of Law No. 7 of 2006 provides that dealings creating, transferring, amending or extinguishing real property rights are not valid unless recorded in the Property Register, and Article 7 gives that register absolute evidentiary value. The date you take title is the date the register says you did.

The corollary is that the ownership rules bite immediately and specifically. Freehold ownership by non-UAE nationals is granted plot by plot rather than city-wide, and some later designations grant usufruct and lease rights of up to 99 years without granting freehold at all. Whether a particular unit is available to you is a question about that plot, answered from the register — not a question about the area's reputation.

The tax treatment is genuinely different from a new-build purchase

The Federal Tax Authority's position is that all supplies of commercial property are subject to VAT at 5%, and a sale is a supply. That is true in both markets. What is different in the secondary market is a specific exception.

Where a tenanted commercial property is sold to a buyer who is a taxable person and the buyer carries on the same leasing business, the transaction can qualify as a Transfer of a Going Concern. Our article on VAT rules when buying commercial property in Dubai works through both markets in detail, and the FTA's own commercial-property payment route excludes exactly this case — the sale of a commercial property with the benefit of sitting tenants to a taxable buyer, where the transaction qualifies as the transfer of a business — from the transaction-level VAT payment it otherwise requires.

The reason this matters on a real purchase is cash flow. Getting the treatment right, in the contract and in the documentation, is worth real money on a tenanted asset, and getting it wrong is the kind of error the FTA assesses later. Our corporate tax and VAT guide carries the FTA sourcing in full, including the instruction that VAT must be paid before you begin the ownership transfer with the Land Department and that you must keep the payment transaction number and the seller's tax invoice. None of that is advice for your transaction — take an FTA-registered tax agent for that — but you should know the questions before you are at the trustee's counter.

What the transfer costs

The Land Department's published fee lines for a property sale registration are 2% of the sale value from the seller and 2% from the buyer, plus AED 250 for the title deed certificate, AED 225 for a unified Dubai Municipality map, AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation fees, and a registration trustee fee of AED 4,000 plus VAT on sales of AED 500,000 or more. Those are the figures recorded on the DLD service card as read in August 2026, and government fees are revised periodically — confirm them on DLD's own page on the day rather than from any guide, including this one.

Financing is the piece we deliberately do not put a number on. The lending terms available on a commercial resale purchase depend on the asset, the tenant, the borrower and the bank, and the numbers in general circulation contradict each other often enough that quoting one here would be worse than quoting none. Our commercial mortgages page sets out the shape of the market, and the honest next step is a lender or a broker who will underwrite your actual purchase.

What we check before a unit appears on this page

Every listing here states its use class, its sub-community, whether the title is freehold or leasehold, whether the unit is vacant or tenanted, and the size together with what that size measures — title deed built-up area and a measured net internal area are not the same number, and comparing one against the other is the most common way two commercial units get compared wrongly.

Where we publish a figure, we publish where it came from. An asking price carries the party who quoted it and the date they quoted it. A service charge carries the year it applies to and the statement it is taken from. A passing rent carries the contract it is read off. Where we do not hold a sourced figure, the listing says so and prints nothing — an absent number here means we do not have one we can stand behind, not that there is nothing to tell you.

Availability in this market moves faster than any published page. Treat a listing as the start of a conversation rather than a live inventory feed, and ask us before you build a plan around a specific unit at a specific price.