Dubai property notes, for owners not buyers.

Most Dubai property coverage is written to move inventory. It leads with the headline transaction total, quotes an agency forecast, and stops before the part that matters to someone who already holds a unit. These notes start from the other end: what the registered record says, and what it changes about a property already in your name.

The source is the Dubai Land Department transaction file and the Ejari lease record. That means registered prices rather than asking prices, and it means the figures lag the market by a few weeks rather than leading it by a few months. We think that trade is worth making.

For the standing answers rather than the quarterly ones, the guides cover service charges, the Decree 43 rent cap, valuation and the cost of selling. The calculators run your own numbers through the same arithmetic, and sell or hold is the decision page those numbers usually lead to.

A quarterly note is the right cadence for this data. Registration lags the transaction, so a monthly read is mostly noise, and an annual one arrives too late to act on. Three months is long enough for the registered record to settle and short enough that a change in a community’s price per square foot or its rent-to-price ratio still means something for what you hold.

We publish the figures a claim rests on rather than only the commentary, so nothing here has to be taken on trust. The owner pages set out what each of these movements means depending on whether you hold one unit, a portfolio, an off-plan purchase or a property managed from abroad.