September 2026
It looked fine
I was writing about how to read Dubai Land Department transaction data, and my research came back with a nice seasonal finding. October is the busiest month, averaging just under fifty thousand transactions, twenty-six per cent above the monthly average. January is the quietest, eighteen per cent below.
It was specific, it was intuitive, and it was exactly the kind of thing I like to put in a chart. I had drafted the sentence.
Then I did the sum. Twenty-six per cent above average gives a monthly average of about thirty-nine and a half thousand. Twelve of those is about four hundred and seventy-four thousand transactions a year. The same research, a few paragraphs earlier, put the total for 2025 at about two hundred and sixty-seven thousand.
Both cannot be true. Probably the monthly figures were totals across several years, described as averages. But I do not know that, and the version I nearly printed would have been wrong by a factor of nearly two.
Where it came from, which is the uncomfortable part
The figure came from a research summary that my own research tool had generated from its sources, and then cited as if it were one of them.
That summary was the most-cited item in the whole notebook. Most of the new numbers in this topic rest on it and nothing else: the off-plan share of sales, the property-type split, the seasonality, the whole fee table. When I checked the fee table line by line, the buyer total was twenty dirhams more than its own lines added up to, in every column. Harmless, and a small tell that nobody had added it up.
I say this as someone who spends a lot of words telling people that this market repeats unverified summaries. I nearly repeated one I had commissioned myself.
The thing I should have been doing anyway
The article I was writing is about four questions you ask a row of registry data before you count it. Was it a sale, or a mortgage or a gift. Off-plan or ready. What kind of property. Are you comparing like with like.
I have quoted headline DLD counts in meetings without asking the first of those. I suspect most people in my trade have. A total that includes mortgage registrations is not a measure of buying, and I have used it as one because it was the number on the slide.
And there is a limit I had never noticed until this week: in the registered data, a developer's first sale of an off-plan unit and that buyer's later resale of the contract sit in the same bucket. You cannot cleanly separate them from a release. So every confident "flip rate" I have heard quoted, including the ones I nodded along to, needed a method nobody showed.
The range everybody quotes
One more, because it has an actual cost attached.
If you sell an off-plan contract before handover, every guide says the cost is somewhere between six and eleven per cent. I have repeated that range.
It turns out to be two different things glued together. Some sources give the developer's consent fee as a flat few thousand dirhams. Others give it as two to five per cent of the value. On a million-dirham contract that is the difference between about 6.8% and up to about 11.6% for the whole round trip. The range is not a spread of market outcomes. It is a disagreement about how one fee is charged, and the answer for any particular buyer is sitting in their contract.
So the useful sentence was never "six to eleven per cent". It was "ask for the NOC fee in writing before you sign".
What I take from it
Two things.
Do the sum. Not as an audit, just as a reflex. Multiply the monthly by twelve. Add up the column. Check the percentage against the total. Most bad numbers in this market would not survive thirty seconds of arithmetic, and neither would a couple of mine.
A range is often a disagreement in disguise. When a source gives you "six to eleven", ask whether that is a spread of outcomes or two people describing the same thing differently. The second is more common than it looks, and it is more useful, because a disagreement can be settled with a document and a spread cannot.
I am a broker, not a data analyst, lawyer or financial adviser, and none of this is advice about any property. It is an admission that I nearly published a wrong number, and a note on the thirty seconds that caught it.
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 financial, legal or investment advice. I am a licensed real estate broker.
