The Dubai Off-Plan Index

What the registered figures are. Every sale registered with the Dubai Land Department, aggregated by community. A community's rate is the median price per square foot of the sales registered in the last three months; the figure beside it is its sales over the last twelve. 73 communities clear the 10-sale minimum and are published, on 158,879 registered sales between them. These are all property types and both off-plan and completed transfers, because that is how the register records them, and they are transaction prices rather than valuations.

What the asking figures are. For every off-plan project we hold a list of unit types. A unit type's rate is its stated starting price divided by its stated floor area. A project's rate is the median of its unit types, so a tower with forty layouts and a villa release with four count once each. A community's or developer's rate is the median of its projects, and the band is the 25th to the 75th percentile of the same set. The source publishes no rate of its own to check the division against, which is precisely why these sit below the registered figures rather than above them.

The minimum sample. An asking price is published only where at least 8 of a community's or developer's projects carry a rate. Below that a single villa release moves the median further than the gap between two neighbouring communities. 88 Dubai communities fall under the minimum and are left out entirely rather than printed with a caveat.

Coverage. The developer register holds 1,919 off-plan projects across the UAE, 1,579 of them in Dubai. Of the Dubai projects, 853 (54%) publish unit sizes alongside unit prices and can be rated; the rest publish a headline price with no size, or no price, and contribute nothing to either asking ladder. This is the same register the project pages and the off-plan hub count, so the totals on this page and on those agree.

What this index does not cover, and cannot. Neither register carries rental values, because rental contracts are not in the data we can republish, so no yield is printed anywhere on this site as a headline number. The registered ladder says nothing about a specific unit: a community median covers studios and penthouses, plots and towers together, and the per-building figures at /sold are where a real comparison starts. The asking ladders say nothing about what anything sold for. Where the two disagree for a community, the registered figure is the one to quote.

The developer register is a broad, continuously maintained record of publicly marketed off-plan projects. It is not a register of every project in the emirate. Developer-stated prices, sizes, dates and payment plans change after publication. Where a project does not state a value it is excluded from that calculation rather than estimated. The Land Department register is a record of completed transfers and is republished as the department publishes it.