63% of sales are for a building that does not exist yet.
Of 495,060 sales the Land Department recorded since 2024, 63% went through as Sell — Pre registration: an Oqood entry against an off-plan unit, not a title transfer. Buying in Dubai mostly means signing for something unbuilt and converting to a title deed at handover.
| Procedure | What it is | Recorded | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sell - Pre registration | Off-plan, entered on the Oqood interim register | 309,696 | 63% |
| Sell | Completed home, title transferred | 126,365 | 26% |
| Delayed Sell | Sale registered with transfer deferred | 48,134 | 10% |
| Sell Development | Developer-side registration | 3,823 | 1% |
Sales procedures recorded from 2024 onward. Source: Dubai Land Department, to 4 August 2026.
Four per cent, on prices people actually paid.
The Land Department transfer fee is 4%of the purchase price. It is customarily paid by the buyer, though that is negotiable, and it sits on top of registration and trustee-office fees and agency commission. “Four per cent” means nothing until there is a price beside it, so here it is against the median recorded sale in each district.
| District | Median recorded sale | Transfer fee at 4% | AED / sqft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Bay | AED 1.65M | AED 66,000 | 1,994 |
| Downtown Dubai | AED 3.00M | AED 120,000 | 2,621 |
| Dubai Harbour | AED 3.60M | AED 144,000 | 3,353 |
| Palm Jumeirah | AED 4.50M | AED 180,000 | 2,805 |
Medians of completed-home sales, 2026 to date. These are recorded transactions, not asking prices, and a median is not a valuation of any particular home.
Freehold, any nationality, no residency required.
- Freehold in designated areas. Foreign buyers own outright in Dubai’s freehold zones, which includes every district we cover. No nationality restriction and no requirement to live here.
- Golden Visa from AED 2M. Property at or above that can make a buyer eligible for the ten-year residency. It depends on your circumstances and on the property being registered in your name — a starting point, not a guarantee.
- No annual property tax. There is no recurring property tax in the UAE and no capital gains tax on the sale. The 4% transfer fee is a one-off.
Neither of them is about paperwork.
The process is the easy part. What decides whether it goes well is settled before any of it: whether off-plan is actually cheaper — on the register, in most of Dubai, it is not — and what goes wrong when it does, where the median project took three years to deliver and one in ten took over five and a half.
Then the four things a legitimate off-plan advert must carry: the Trakheesi permit number, the developer, the escrow account and the completion date. Every project file we publish states its own position on all four, including where one is still open.
The limits, stated.
- No loan terms. Rates and loan-to-value are a bank’s business and they change. We do not publish them and you should not take them from a property site.
- No tax advice. There is no UAE property tax, but what you owe at home depends on where you are resident. Ask someone qualified in your jurisdiction.
- No figures for Abu Dhabi. Everything here is the Dubai register. Abu Dhabi has a different regulator and its equivalent is not public in this form.