CRESCO INSIGHTS · CRESCO RESEARCH
We are not against Dubai. We are against selling without disclosure. Five practices, measured against 18,587 registered Dubai Land Department transactions.
We are not against Dubai.
We respect its ambition, its infrastructure, its leadership and its extraordinary ability to attract people and capital from around the world. Cresco Real Estate is a Dubai licensed brokerage. Our business exists because Dubai built something worth investing in.
Our concern is narrower and more specific. It is with a handful of practices that risk damaging the confidence Dubai has spent two decades building.
Questioning those practices is not an attack on Dubai. It is a call for the transparency and buyer protection that a market of this size has earned.
We are not saying Dubai property is a bubble. We are not predicting a crash. We are not saying developers are acting unlawfully, and we name no developer in this article.
Dubai already has more structural protection than most emerging property markets. Escrow accounts are mandatory under Dubai Law No. 8 of 2007. Off plan sales are recorded on the Oqood interim register. Advertising requires a Trakheesi permit. Brokerages carry a RERA ORN and agents carry a BRN. The Dubai Land Department publishes its transaction data openly, which is more than most global cities do.
That regulatory floor is real, and it is why we can write this article using the government's own numbers rather than anecdotes.
We took 18,587 residential sales registered with the Dubai Land Department between 30 June and 18 August 2026 and compared off plan against ready. Not across the whole market, which would be meaningless, but only where the community and the bedroom count matched and each side had at least ten registered sales.
Sixty clean comparisons covering 6,295 sales.
Off plan registered a median 27% above ready stock per square foot. 54 of the 60 comparisons went that way. 22 showed a premium above 40%. In six, off plan was cheaper, and we published those too.
Part of that premium is legitimate. You pay across three to four years instead of today, and the building is new against ready stock often 15 to 20 years old. But a 27% median is not a rounding error, and almost nobody puts that number in front of a buyer before they sign.
Pay 20% during construction, 80% at handover. It sounds like an affordability solution. It is a deferral.
The buyer will fund most of that 80% with a mortgage. Banks lend against their own valuation, not the contract price. Under UAE Central Bank Circular 31/2013 as amended, an expatriate buying a first home up to AED 5,000,000 can borrow a maximum of 80% of the value of the property.
| Scenario on a AED 5,000,000 purchase | Loan available | Due at handover | Cash shortfall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expat 80% LTV, valuation holds | AED 4,000,000 | AED 4,000,000 | AED 0 |
| Expat 80% LTV, valuation 15% below | AED 3,400,000 | AED 4,000,000 | AED 600,000 |
| Non resident 60% LTV, valuation holds | AED 3,000,000 | AED 4,000,000 | AED 1,000,000 |
| Non resident 60% LTV, valuation 15% below | AED 2,550,000 | AED 4,000,000 | AED 1,450,000 |
Read the third row. A non resident capped at 60% loan to value is AED 1,000,000 short even when the valuation comes in exactly at the purchase price. Nothing has to go wrong. The arithmetic fails on the day the contract is signed.
Now put that next to the 27% premium. If a buyer paid well above the comparable resale market, a valuation gap is not a risk scenario. It is the starting position.
76.1% of every registered residential sale in the period was off plan. This is not a fringe product.
A buyer should not need a data analyst to understand what they are signing. Before a reservation deposit is paid, they should see all of this in writing.
None of that is commercially sensitive. All of it is knowable before the sale. Its absence is a choice.
Buyers regularly report delays between paying and seeing their interest recorded. We want to be careful here, because unlike the points above we have not measured this and we will not present an impression as a finding.
What we can say is what the buyer should do. After a deposit, an off plan purchase should appear on the Oqood interim register. Check it yourself in the Dubai REST app rather than accepting a screenshot. If weeks pass and it has not appeared, escalate before the next instalment falls due, not after.
This is the quiet one, and it distorts more decisions than the rest combined.
Advertised prices are not registered prices. Most Dubai price data circulating online is scraped asking prices. Registered prices are what buyers actually paid. They are different numbers and they are rarely labelled.
Averages hide the market. A handful of very large sales in prime districts drag an average far above what a typical buyer pays. We publish medians for that reason.
Mixing off plan and ready inflates a community. Where a community is 98% off plan in a given period, its headline price describes a developer launch, not a resale market.
Volume is not value. A community can trade heavily because one developer released two thousand units, and that reads as demand in a chart.
None of this requires anyone to lie. It only requires them to leave out the label.
One more figure, because it reframes everything above.
Studios were 39.3% of registered residential sales in the period and one bedrooms were 34.5%. Together 74% of the market. Forty four percent of all sales were under USD 250,000 and 78% were under USD 500,000. Fewer than one sale in seventeen crossed a million dollars.
The buyer being sold a 20/80 plan is usually not a billionaire diversifying. They are frequently an ordinary overseas investor putting a meaningful share of their savings into a unit they have never seen, in a market whose price data they cannot easily interpret.
That is exactly the buyer disclosure standards exist to protect.
None of that reduces sales volume in a healthy market. It only reduces sales that were going to fail at handover anyway.
Dubai's long term success should not depend on convincing investors that nothing is wrong. It should depend on giving them enough reliable information to understand the risks and decide for themselves.
Markets that survive downturns are the ones where buyers understood what they bought. Markets that do not are the ones where a wave of buyers discovered the same problem in the same quarter.
Protecting clients, protecting investors and protecting market integrity are the same project. That is a pro Dubai position, and it is why we publish our numbers openly, including the ones that argue against our own headlines.
Dubai has stronger structural protections than most emerging property markets, including mandatory escrow under Dubai Law No. 8 of 2007, the Oqood interim register, Trakheesi advertising permits and open publication of transaction data. The risks that remain are mostly about price and disclosure at the point of sale rather than about the legal framework.
Off plan registered at a median 27% above ready stock per square foot across 60 like for like comparisons of registered Dubai Land Department sales between 30 June and 18 August 2026. That is a premium on new build rather than proof that the market as a whole is overpriced, but it is large enough that buyers should see it before signing.
Funding the balance at handover. On a 20/80 plan, the buyer must find the remaining 80% at completion, usually through a mortgage assessed against the bank's own valuation. A non resident capped at 60% loan to value on a AED 5,000,000 purchase faces a AED 1,000,000 shortfall even if the valuation matches the purchase price.
Because most sources do not say what they are measuring. Advertised asking prices differ from registered transaction prices, averages differ from medians, and mixing off plan with ready inflates any community with active launches. The number changes depending on which of those choices was made and it is rarely disclosed.
Not automatically. In six of our sixty comparisons off plan registered cheaper than ready. The decision should be made per community and per unit type using registered prices, alongside a realistic handover funding test, rather than as a blanket rule.
We would argue the opposite. Confidence built on incomplete information is fragile. Confidence built on disclosure survives a downturn, because buyers understood what they were taking on.
Sources. Off plan premium, off plan market share, unit type mix and price band distribution calculated by Cresco Real Estate LLC from the Dubai Land Department open data portal, registered transactions 30 June to 18 August 2026, 18,587 qualifying residential unit sales after cleaning. Mortgages and gift transfers excluded. Medians, not averages. Loan to value caps per UAE Central Bank Rulebook, amendments to Circular No. 31/2013 on Regulations regarding Mortgage Loans. Escrow requirement per Dubai Law No. 8 of 2007. Non resident loan to value ranges reflect commonly published lender guidance and vary by bank and applicant. Worked examples are illustrative. No developer is named or accused of any breach. Cresco Real Estate LLC, RERA ORN 34288. Market analysis, not investment, mortgage or legal advice.
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