What 26,515 registered sales show, and why the brochure figure is the wrong place to start
Every off-plan project in Dubai advertises a "from" price. It is a real number, and it is almost never the number you will pay. It describes the smallest, lowest-floor, least-favourably-oriented unit in the building, on the developer's current release. It is a starting point for a conversation, not a valuation.
There is a second number, and it is public. Every completed sale in Dubai is registered with the Dubai Land Department. Those registrations say what buyers actually paid.
We hold both. Here is what they look like side by side.
Across the 1,186 off-plan projects with registered sales between 24 April and 29 July 2026, 26,515 sales in total, the median project registered at AED 1,704 per square foot.
That figure needs one caveat to be honest: it is the median of each project's median, not the median of all 26,515 individual sales. It tells you what a typical project transacts at. It does not tell you what a typical buyer paid, because projects with more sales carry no more weight than projects with fewer.
The spread matters more than the middle. The tenth percentile of projects registers around AED 1,183 per square foot; the ninetieth sits near AED 3,070. Dubai is not one market with one price. It is a range of roughly two and a half times, and where a project sits in that range is a fact you can check before anyone quotes you anything.
Our own live inventory is 1,273 Dubai off-plan projects, every one of them carrying a real entry price. The median entry price is AED 1,719,888. The cheapest is AED 142,777. The tenth and ninetieth percentiles are AED 743,077 and AED 7,278,528.
Notice these are not per-square-foot figures. An entry price is a whole-unit price for the smallest unit on offer. Comparing it directly to a psf figure is comparing a total to a rate.
An entry price tells you the cost of admission. A registered psf tells you what the building is worth. You need both, and they answer different questions.
The point is not that developers are overcharging. It is that "from AED 1.4M" and "this unit, at this size, in this building" are separated by a multiplication most buyers never do.
There is no trend here. This is a single ninety-day window, and we are not going to tell you prices are rising or falling on the strength of one snapshot. Anyone who does, on this data, is guessing.
It also says nothing about rental yield, service charges, or what a unit resells for. Registered sales are what someone paid on a particular day. They are a strong anchor and a poor crystal ball.
Source: Dubai Land Department registered sales, 24 April to 29 July 2026, covering 1,186 off-plan projects and 26,515 registered sales. Source: our own live inventory of 1,273 Dubai off-plan projects, re-checked against developer feeds nightly. Figures are as at 29 July 2026 and are not re-stated when the underlying data moves; check the current inventory for live prices.