September 2026
The sentence
"I'll just sell before handover."
I hear it more than almost anything else in this job. Usually it is said with confidence, as if it were a fact about the future rather than a hope about it.
I have always treated it as one option on a menu. Sell the contract, or take the keys and refinance, or take the keys and rent. Three exits, pick the one that suits you, and if you change your mind you move to another.
This week I ran the numbers on all three against one unit, and I think I had it wrong. Not the facts. The shape.
They are not a menu. They are a sequence. And the last step in the sequence is one I had never put a number on.
What the first exit is worth
Take an ordinary case. A one and a half million dirham unit on a 40/60 plan. You have paid 40%, six hundred thousand, plus the 4% land department fee at booking, sixty thousand.
You resell the contract at a 10% uplift. A hundred and fifty thousand of premium. It sounds like a good result, and it is the result most people imagine when they say the sentence.
Then the developer takes an assignment fee, commonly reported at 2% to 5% of the original price. The agent takes 2% plus VAT. There is a NOC fee. And the sixty thousand you paid at booking is still gone.
At a 2% developer fee you keep about twenty thousand dirhams. Roughly 3% on six hundred and sixty thousand of your money, over however many years the build took. At 5%, you lose money.
To break even you need an uplift of somewhere between about 8.6% and 11.7%, depending on the developer's fee.
Who is on the other side
Then there is the buyer, which is the part I think people skip entirely.
Your buyer is buying off-plan. They can borrow at most half the value. They cannot borrow their fees, not since February 2025. And the bank will not release money until the building is well along, somewhere past a third of the way for a resident and more for someone overseas.
So early in the build, the person buying your contract is almost always paying cash. That is a real market, but it is a narrow one, and in a year when a lot of units are completing at once, you are not the only seller in it.
The step I had never costed
If the sale does not happen, you are at handover. The balance is due. On a 40/60 plan, nine hundred thousand.
Dubai's off-plan law sets out what a developer may do when a buyer does not pay, and it depends on how complete the project is. At 80% or more, the developer can keep what you have paid and pursue the rest, go to auction through the land department, or cancel and keep up to 40% of the contract value.
At handover, the project is complete. Every buyer who cannot pay at handover is in that top tier.
Forty per cent of one and a half million is six hundred thousand. On a 40/60 plan, that is every dirham you paid.
I knew that table. I have written about it. What I had not done was lay it next to the handover date and see that the harshest row is exactly where the "I'll sell before handover" plan lands if it fails.
What I take from it
The full version of the sentence is longer. "I'll sell before handover, and if I cannot, I can fund the balance, and here is where that money is coming from."
If you cannot say the second half, you do not have an exit. You have a deadline.
That is not an argument against buying off-plan to resell. People do it and it works. It is an argument for running one number before you sign: the cash you need at handover if nobody buys your contract, including the chance the bank values the unit below what you paid.
The same idea generalises past property. A plan is only as good as its fallback, and the fallback is the part nobody costs, because costing it means admitting the first plan might not work.
I am a broker, not a financial adviser or a lawyer, so none of that is advice about your contract. It is the question I will be asking first from now on.
Idris Dad writes about off-plan strategy across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah.
More on how I work with buyers at offplancrypto.com.
Nothing here is investment, mortgage or legal advice. I am a licensed real estate broker, not a financial adviser or lawyer, and no developer is named.
