Investor Tools
Investment Calculator
One purchase, three ways of paying for it. Set your own price, rent, costs and holding period, and read what the money actually does over the hold.
Cash, mortgaged, or a resale
Illustrative model
Scenario modeller
Set your own assumptions and see how a Dubai property behaves as a cash purchase, the same purchase mortgaged, or a capital-only resale.
Enter the asking price to run the model.
Every figure recalculates as you type. Use the price you are actually considering.
How each figure is calculated
- Handover
- The date the unit is handed over, set in quarters from purchase. Gross rent, the vacancy allowance, maintenance and management, and the service charge all start there and not before — an unbuilt unit cannot be let and is not billed. The year handover falls in gets the exact fraction it is entitled to, not a rounded whole year. Capital growth is not treated this way: it compounds from today across the whole hold, because an off-plan unit can be sold before it completes. Where the holding period ends before handover, there is no operating income anywhere in the schedule and the whole return is capital movement less costs.
- Gross yield
- Gross annual rent ÷ purchase price. Before every cost. Where handover is in the future this is a stabilised full year from handover — a rate on the price, not a figure reduced by the construction period. The schedule shows what each year actually books.
- Net yield
- (Rent collected after the vacancy allowance − maintenance and management − service charge) ÷ purchase price. Stabilised on the same basis as the gross yield.
- Rent growth
- Compound annual movement in gross rent, applied from handover and stepping at each anniversary of it, which is when a tenancy renews. It may be negative. It does not touch the service charge, which is held flat in nominal terms.
- ROI
- Total profit over the whole hold ÷ total cash invested (price + all acquisition costs). Unlevered. Not an annual rate.
- ROE
- Total profit over the whole hold ÷ equity contributed (deposit + all acquisition and finance costs), after debt service. Levered. Not an annual rate.
- Cash-on-cash return
- Year-one operating cash flow, after debt service where there is a mortgage, ÷ cash invested. Reported separately from ROI/ROE and never merged with it. Year one means the first year of the schedule as it stands: where that year falls before handover it carries no rent, so on a mortgaged off-plan purchase the figure is negative — that is the year you fund out of pocket, and it is shown rather than smoothed away.
- IRR
- The annualised rate that discounts the dated cash-flow schedule above to a net present value of zero, solved numerically. Where the schedule has no sign change, or the solver does not converge on a single meaningful rate, we print “—” rather than substitute a simpler annualised-return figure.
An illustrative model, not a forecast, a valuation, an offer or investment advice. Every figure is generated from the assumptions on this page — some yours, the rest stated defaults, not promises. Rents, service charges, fees, vacancy, handover dates, financing terms and sale prices vary by unit and over time; past prices are not a guide to future prices. Returns are not guaranteed and capital is at risk.
Mortgage availability, loan-to-value, rate and term are subject to lender criteria and underwriting; nothing here indicates that finance will be offered. Figures exclude any tax payable in your country of residence — take independent financial, tax and legal advice before committing. Mitchell’s Realty is a trading brand; the RERA-licensed entity is The Luxury Real Estate Brokers LLC.
How to read the three modes
The same purchase can look like a good decision on one funding basis and a poor one on another. This calculator exists to make that difference explicit rather than to produce a single headline number.
What the three modes actually change
Cash buys the asset outright. Your capital at completion is the purchase price plus every acquisition cost, and the return is whatever the rent and the eventual sale produce against that whole sum. There is no debt service, so the cash flow is the cleanest of the three and usually the lowest percentage return.
Mortgage holds the purchase identical and changes only how it is funded. The loan is set by the loan-to-value you choose, and the equity you contribute at completion is the deposit plus every acquisition cost, the bank arrangement fee and the mortgage registration fee — none of which UAE lenders finance. That is why the return figures switch from return on cash to return on equity here: the denominator is no longer the price of the asset, it is what you personally put in.
Resale is the capital-only case: buy, hold, sell, with no rent set against the costs at all. It answers a narrower question than the other two — whether price movement alone covers the cost of getting in and out — and it is the honest way to model an off-plan unit you intend to exit before handover, when there is no letting income to model in the first place.
The figures the model returns
- Gross yieldgross annual rent divided by the purchase price, before any cost at all.
- Net yieldnet operating income — rent collected less management, maintenance and service charge — divided by the purchase price.
- Return on cash / equitytotal profit over the whole holding period divided by what you invested. It is a cumulative figure, not an annual one, and the caption on screen says so.
- IRRthe discount rate at which the cash-flow schedule below the figures has a net present value of zero — the one measure that accounts for when money arrives rather than only how much of it does.
- Cash-on-cash, year 1first-year operating cash flow after debt service, divided by the equity contributed. Not the same measure as return on equity, and frequently negative on a leveraged off-plan purchase where year one falls entirely before handover.
Underneath those headline figures the panel prints the full year-by-year cash-flow schedule the IRR is computed from, the itemised cash required at completion, and a sensitivity table showing how the result moves as the exit growth assumption changes. Read the sensitivity table before drawing any conclusion: it is the part of the page that shows how much of the answer is your growth assumption rather than the asset.
How to use it well
- Start with the price you are actually considering. Nothing is seeded here — this URL has no particular asset behind it — so the model stays quiet until you enter a price. That is deliberate: a pre-filled price would be a number nobody chose.
- Set the size and the service charge before the rent. The service charge is entered per square foot and is one of the largest recurring costs on a Dubai asset, so a placeholder size quietly distorts every net figure below it.
- Set the handover timing honestly. Rent cannot start before handover, and the schedule enforces that. An off-plan unit two years out earns nothing in years one and two while the costs — and any debt service — run anyway.
- Run all three modes on the same assumptions. Leverage raises the return when the asset performs and deepens the loss when it does not. Seeing the same purchase in cash and mortgaged form is the whole point of the tabs.
- Then move one assumption at a time. Growth, holding period, vacancy, rate. If the case only works at the top of the range you were willing to type, it is the assumption that is working, not the asset.
What it does not do
It does not value the property: an indicative value from income is a separate exercise, and the Commercial Property Value Estimator is the tool for it. It does not tell you whether a lender will write the loan you have modelled — availability, loan-to-value, rate and term all sit with the bank’s underwriting. It carries no tax of any kind, including whatever is payable in your country of residence. And it forecasts nothing: every rate of growth in it is a figure you typed, which is why the panel labels itself an illustrative model rather than a projection.
Who this calculator is for
It is for the private investor deciding whether to buy in cash or borrow; for the portfolio manager testing a new acquisition against the returns already on the book; for the off-plan buyer working out whether an exit before handover clears the cost of entry; and for anyone about to sit down with a lender or an adviser who would rather arrive with a stress-tested position than a hopeful one. It is a modelling instrument, not advice — the disclaimer above it is the operative statement of that, and it is worth reading.
Modelled something you want a second opinion on? Send the assumptions through and we will tell you where they sit against what is actually trading.
Speak to usThe rest of the toolkit
5 more calculators that work from your own figures, on the same set of Dubai investment questions.
