How to Check Dubai Property Prices and Rents with Official Data

You can check what Dubai property actually sells and rents for using Dubai Land Department’s own records. DLD publishes registered sale and rental transactions, a Rental Index, a Service Charge Index and a price index, and its Dubai REST app brings most of them to your phone. This guide explains what each tool shows and how to read the results well.

Why we point you to official data

We do not publish prices, rents or yields on this site. Any figure we printed would be out of date within weeks, and it would describe an average rather than the unit you are considering.

Registered data is better evidence than adverts. Asking prices and rents show what sellers and landlords hope for. DLD’s records show what buyers and tenants actually agreed to pay, as registered with the authority. Learning to read them takes a short time and makes you harder to mislead.

DLD Real Estate Data: searching registered transactions

DLD’s Real Estate Data page has separate searches for transactions, rents, projects, valuations, land, buildings, units, brokers and developers. Most searches ask for a date range, and each asks for a captcha.

Transactions. Choose a date range, then filter by transaction type (sales, mortgages or gifts), registration type (ready or off-plan), freehold or not, area, usage and property type. The results list each registered transaction with its date, amount, transaction and property size in square metres, number of rooms, nearby landmarks and the master project and project names. You can download them as a CSV file.

Rents. The same approach works for rental contracts. You can filter by area, usage and property type, and separate new contracts from renewals. Results show the contract amount and the annual amount, property size, rooms and project.

Projects. The project search shows registered projects with their developer, status, completion percentage, escrow account number and dates. For checking a specific off-plan project, also use DLD's Project Status Enquiry (Mashrooi) on the DLD website and in the Dubai REST app.

The page notes that data for earlier years is available through Dubai’s open data platform.

The residential sales price index

DLD’s Residential Sales Price Index tracks how residential sale prices have moved over time. You can view it for all homes, villas or apartments, by month, quarter or year. It uses a hedonic method, which adjusts for differences between properties, such as size and type, so that changes in the index reflect price movement rather than a change in what was sold.

Read the index with two cautions:

• Check the reference period. The page shows which month, quarter or year the latest figures relate to. Make sure that period is recent enough for your question.
• Respect DLD’s disclaimer. DLD states that it does not claim forecast accuracy and that the index should not be used for commercial purposes, including pricing, investment decisions or measuring performance. Use it to understand broad trends, and use registered transactions for comparable units to judge a specific price.

The Rental Index

The DLD Rental Index (website, Ejari system, Dubai REST) gives the average rent for units similar to yours. You can search by your DEWA premise number, your Ejari contract number, or by area, building or community, together with the property type and number of bedrooms. The index has tabs for residential, commercial and other property types, and a location map.

The Rental Index has two jobs:

1. A reference for new leases. DLD describes it as indicative, not binding, when a new lease is agreed.
2. The basis for rent increases at renewal. Enter the contract end date and current annual rent, and the calculator shows the maximum increase allowed under the rules. See our guide to renting out your Dubai property for how the increase rules work.

The Dubai REST app

DLD describes the Dubai REST app as its smart real estate platform for owners, tenants, brokers, developers, investors and others in the market. It is available in Arabic and English. According to DLD, it gives you:

• Indices: the rental index, the sale index and the service charge index.
• Off-plan project information: real-time details such as completion percentage, actual project photos, the escrow account number and payments due, with the option to follow projects you are interested in.
• Your own property: a wallet showing information including current prices, rental return and service charges for properties you own, plus services to register leases, pay service charges and request a valuation.
• Market participants: details of licensed brokers and their performance levels, brokerage offices and their classifications, and certified developers.

The Service Charge Index

Service charges come straight off your rental income, so check them before you buy. The DLD / RERA Service Charge Index returns service charge rates approved by RERA in two ways:

• By title deed, using the certificate number and year, property type and budget year, for a unit that is already registered.
• By project, choosing the project, its usage and the year, which is the route to use before you buy.

The results can be exported as a PDF. The index notes that the figures do not include arrears, so ask the seller or the management company whether any charges are unpaid. Our guide to service charges explains how they are set and paid.

Reading the data well

Raw data can mislead if you compare the wrong things. A few habits help:

• Separate off-plan from ready. Off-plan sales and ready sales are different markets. Use the registration type filter so you compare like with like.
• Match the unit. Size, number of bedrooms, floor, view and the specific building all affect price. An area-wide figure can hide large differences between buildings.
• Use price per square metre carefully. It helps compare units of different sizes, but only when the units are otherwise similar.
• Look at recent dates. Markets change. Older transactions tell you about the past, not about today.
• Watch for outliers. A single very high or low transaction may be a special case. Look at the range of results, not one record.
• Check rents the same way. Separate new contracts from renewals, because renewal rents are limited by the increase rules and may differ from rents agreed on new contracts.
• Do not treat the past as a forecast. Our guide to capital growth vs rental income explains why.

With these figures in hand, you can work out what a unit might return using the method in how to calculate rental yield, and compare locations with our framework for choosing an area in Dubai. For the areas we cover, see where to invest in Dubai.