What Counts as a Sale
A quarter of Dubai's transaction records are not sales at all, and one area appeared to trade at AED 45 per square foot. How the figures on this site are actually built.
A property site lives or dies on one question: when it prints a price, does that price mean what a reader assumes it means? Getting there took removing more data than we kept.
A quarter of the records are not sales
The Land Department's transaction record covers three kinds of entry. Of 130,100 records in the period, sales 99,889, mortgage 24,947, gifts 5,264.
A mortgage value is a loan amount, not a sale price. A gift may be recorded at a nominal figure. Averaging all three together would inflate every headline on the site — and it is an easy mistake, because all three arrive in one file with one value column.
So the price gate is narrow by design: only records typed as sales, only where a usable price and area are both present.
Record mix
99,889 sales against 24,947 mortgage and 5,264 gifts.
Then land nearly broke it again
With mortgages and gifts removed, one area still reported a median of AED 45 per square foot. Nothing was wrong with the arithmetic. That area trades almost entirely in raw commercial land, and land genuinely does change hands near that figure.
But sitting in a list beside apartment prices, it reads as an apartment price. Price per square foot only means something within one asset class — a plot and a flat are not comparable, and putting them in the same column is misleading even when every number in it is correct.
The obvious fix was wrong. Restricting to records typed "Unit" would have deleted the entire villa market: Dubai records villas and townhouses as buildings, and communities like Arabian Ranches have no rows typed as units at all. The correct cut is built property — units and buildings — excluding raw land.
That moved the Dubai-wide median by about one per cent, took the absurd area from AED 45 to roughly AED 1,180, and reduced coverage from 100 areas to 90. The ten that dropped out are land-dominated, and a median for them would have described something other than a home.
The rest of the rules
Medians, never averages
The data contains legitimate billion-dirham portfolio transactions. An average would be dragged upward by a handful of them and would describe nobody's experience.
Small samples are withheld
An area needs at least 100 recorded sales to get a page. 177 areas do not meet that bar and are not published rather than shown with an unreliable median.
Implausible records are excluded
A land parcel recorded at 394 million m², or a valuation of exactly one dirham, is set aside rather than averaged in. Each exclusion is deliberate and reasoned.
Case variants are merged
DLD records the same place as "Palm Deira" and "PALM DEIRA". Those are combined; genuinely different names are left separate, because deciding two names mean one place needs human review.
What this is not
This is an information and research product. It is not investment advice, not a valuation, and not a substitute for regulated professional guidance. Figures may differ from other published sources that use different definitions or time windows — where they do, the difference is usually definitional rather than one source being wrong.
Coverage runs 1 Jan 2026 to 31 Jul 2026, from 91,909 recorded sales.