Reselling a Dubai off-plan property before handover

The interim property register, the one the market calls Oqood, exists under Law No. 13 of 2008. Article 6 of that law states that real property units sold off plan and entered on the register maintained by the Department “may be disposed of by way of sale, mortgage, or any other legal disposition”. There is no minimum percentage of the price in that article, and we found none anywhere else in the law or in the Law No. 19 of 2020 amendment.

So an assignment before handover is not an exception the Land Department tolerates. It is the ordinary use of a register built to make a contract transferable before the building exists. What stands in your way is the Sale and Purchase Agreement, not the statute.

Almost every article on Dubai assignment sales says you must have paid 30% to 40% of the price before you may resell, and several name developers and figures as though quoting a regulation. We could not find that rule in any Dubai statute or resolution we read on 4 September 2026.

There is a real 25% and a real 40% in Dubai off-plan law, and they belong to a different rule. Article 11 of Law No. 13 of 2008, as replaced by Law No. 19 of 2020, caps what a developer may retain when it terminates the contract of a purchaser who has defaulted: up to 40% of the unit value above 60% completion, and up to 25% below 60% where work has commenced. That is a ceiling on a remedy against someone who has stopped paying. It says nothing about the freedom of a paying buyer to assign, and the resemblance between the numbers is the likely source of the confusion.

The threshold that will actually stop you is contractual. Developers commonly refuse an assignment until a stated share of the price is paid, and they set that share themselves, in the SPA. It is a clause, not a law, which means it is worth reading before you sign and worth asking about before you list.

The no objection certificate is not market folklore. The document lists DLD publishes name it. The mortgage registration service requires “a no-objection e-certificate (E.NOC) from the developer of the provisional sale properties (via Dubai REST App)”, and the property sale registration service requires a developer e-NOC for freehold areas through the same app. Developer consent is a documented gate into the registry, not a courtesy you can route around.

What the Land Department does not publish is the price. We searched its service pages and the Dubai legislation library and found no NOC fee, no range and no turnaround time. The figures that circulate come from brokerages, and each developer sets its own. Ask for the number and the processing time in writing before you agree a price with a buyer.

DLD prices every sale registration it publishes at 4% of the sale value. The initial sale service, which puts an off-plan purchase on the interim register, bills the seller 2% and the purchaser 2%, plus an AED 10 knowledge fee and an AED 10 innovation fee. The property sale registration service carries the same 2% and 2%.

One caution, and it is ours rather than the Land Department’s. We could not locate a DLD service page that describes itself as the transfer of an off-plan unit from one buyer to another. The property sale registration page speaks of a completed unit. The closest match by wording is Request to Amend the Initial Procedures Data, which lets a developer “modify the details of the procedures registered in the real estate provisional register” for AED 250 plus the two AED 10 fees over six business days, and it does not say a change of purchaser falls within its scope.

So plan for 4% on the new sale value, because that is what DLD charges on every sale type it does publish, and ask the developer to confirm in writing which service the transfer runs through and what it costs. Refuse any quotation showing both a 4% DLD fee and a separate percentage called an Oqood fee, for the reason set out in our guide to DLD fees.

You are assigning at AED 2,000,000. Take the side of the incoming buyer first, because that is the side the price has to survive. On the fee lines DLD publishes for a sale registration, 4% of AED 2,000,000 is AED 80,000, plus AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation. That is AED 80,020 to the Land Department, and it is the only part of the transaction with a published tariff.

Then the lines nobody publishes. The NOC fee, set by the developer. Any administrative charge for handling the transfer. A registration trustee or service partner charge, which the DLD property sale registration page shows as AED 2,000 to AED 4,000 plus VAT on a completed unit. And agency commission, which on a resale is paid by the parties rather than absorbed by a developer.

The honest total is AED 80,020 known and a second block that has to be quoted to you in writing. Anyone offering an all-in percentage for a Dubai assignment is estimating the unpublished part. Get those figures before you agree a price, then run the arithmetic through our cost of buying calculator from the buyer side.

A post-handover plan spreads part of the price over instalments falling due after the keys change hands, and assigning the contract does not compress that. What transfers is the Sale and Purchase Agreement, so your buyer takes the unpaid instalments with the unit, including the ones due after completion.

That changes who your buyer can be. Someone taking over a post-handover plan is underwriting the developer and their own income for years past the handover date, and if they need finance the arithmetic tightens: the Central Bank caps lending against a property bought off plan at 50% of value, so a mortgage will not absorb the remaining schedule. Our off-plan mortgage guide sets out what that cap does.

No Dubai Land Department or RERA text we read on 4 September 2026 distinguishes a post-handover plan from any other schedule, so there is no special procedure here. The clause deciding whether you may assign at all, and on what terms the instalments follow the unit, is in the SPA. Read it before you market the property, and browse current off-plan projects with the same clause in mind.

No figure for a developer NOC fee appears above. The ranges quoted elsewhere, commonly AED 500 to AED 5,250, the two to three working day turnaround that goes with them, the assignment fees of 2% to 5% of the original price, and the all-in resale cost of 6% to 11% all come from brokerage articles. We found no government source for any of them.

The developer-by-developer thresholds naming a percentage against a brand are absent too: they change with the project, and the only version binding you is in your own agreement. Nor could we confirm from a primary page that the 4% is charged again on an assignment specifically.