The areas carrying real registered volume, and the gap between where stock is sold and where it is listed
Marketing budgets and transaction volume are not the same map. The registry shows where deals actually close, and it is worth looking at before deciding where to spend three months of your attention.
Across the ninety days to 29 July 2026, 26,515 off-plan sales were registered across 108 Dubai areas.
Madinat Al Mataar alone accounts for more than a fifth of every registered off-plan sale in the window. That is a concentration worth understanding rather than assuming.
Among areas with at least 100 registered sales, the lowest medians sit near AED 1,150 per square foot in International City Phase 2 and 3, and around AED 1,196 in Dubai Investment Park First.
At the other end, Business Park registers near AED 3,553 psf, Tecom Site A near AED 3,463, and Zaabeel Second near AED 3,276.
That is roughly a threefold spread between liquid, actively transacting areas. Not between a warehouse district and a penthouse, but between places where hundreds of people bought in the same three months.
Volume tells you where a market exists. Price per square foot tells you which market it is. Read them together or you will draw the wrong conclusion from either.
Our own inventory of 1,273 live Dubai projects spans 114 areas, and its concentration is different: Jumeirah Village Circle leads with 132 projects, then Dubai Islands with 96, Business Bay with 67 and Dubailand Residence Complex with 67.
Some overlap is obvious: JVC, Business Bay and Dubailand Residence Complex appear in both lists. Some does not. An area can carry heavy registered volume without a correspondingly large number of currently-marketed projects, which usually means the stock there has already been absorbed.
Neither list is a recommendation. They are two different measurements: what has sold, and what is currently for sale.
The registry's area names arrive in inconsistent forms: the same place can appear in different capitalisations, and occasionally under both an official name and a common one. We have not silently merged them, because merging on a guess would produce a tidier table and a less accurate one. Where two spellings of one area both appear above, treat their volumes as separate readings of the same place.
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. Medians are per-project medians aggregated by area, not transaction-weighted. Figures are as at 29 July 2026.