How we calculate every figure

Where the data comes from

Both refresh daily. The register publishes with a lag of days to weeks, so the most recent week is always incomplete; charts plot complete months only for that reason.

What counts as a sale

Only the register’s sales. Mortgage registrations record a loan, not a price, and gifts transfer at a nominal value, so both are excluded from every price. Off-plan and ready sales are always kept separable, because they are different markets.

We also remove records that are not market sales of a whole home: partial-ownership and share transfers (caught by minimum floor areas per bedroom count, and by prices far below the same building’s norm), and prices an order of magnitude below the area’s. About one sale record in six is removed this way. The count shown beside a figure is always the count it actually stands on.

Which average, and why

Prices are medians. The middle sale, so a single trophy sale cannot drag the figure: one AED 49.9M sale lifts one community’s average to AED 2.75M against a median of AED 1.04M.

Price per square foot is an average of each sale’s own rate, one vote per sale. Dividing by size removes most of the skew, and it is the form the portals publish, so the figures agree when cross-checked.

Ranges beside both. Where we show a range it is the middle half of sales (the 25th to 75th percentile): what a buyer should expect to pay, rather than a single number read as “the price”.

Price changes are ready homes. Whether an area is rising or falling is measured on ready homes only, per square foot: the later half of the period against the earlier half (the last six months against the six before, over twelve months). Off-plan launches sell well above resales, so how many of them happen to sell would move an all-sales average with no home changing value. Where an area has too few ready sales, the change covers all sales and says so. Price levels (median price, price per square foot) cover all sales.

Direction is price per square foot. The median price moves with the mix of homes that happened to sell; price per square foot removes size. Change compares a whole period with the one before it, never the first and last month of a chart.

Rents and rental yield

Rents are single-property residential Ejari leases, counted by the month the lease starts, which is when the rent was agreed. We show the middle rent on new leases: renewals are capped by the RERA index, so they lag what a landlord can ask today. Implausible records (below AED 5,000 a year, or more than 100 times the local median) are removed.

Gross yield is the typical new-lease rent divided by the typical price of a ready home of the same kind and bedroom count in the same area. Off-plan sales are left out because a home that does not exist yet cannot be let. A yield is published only when:

• both the sales and the leases stand on at least 30 records;
• the typical home let and the typical home sold are of similar size (within a factor of 1.5);
• the result falls between 1.5% and 12%. Outside that range it is a mismatch in the records, not an opportunity.

Yields are gross. Service charges, letting fees, maintenance and empty months are not deducted; the yield calculator lets you add them. Short-term holiday lets are not in Ejari, so areas with a large holiday-let market may earn more than these figures show.

Buildings, transactions and the price index

Building pages cover every project with at least 10 cleaned sales in twelve months: the floor for a single building, whose homes are alike. Projects busy with off-plan launches qualify on volume; existing towers qualify on as few as ten resales. Each runs through the same query LEA uses, so the cleaning is identical. A page is withheld when the register’s project name also matches another project for more than a tenth of the sales, rather than publish a blend of two buildings.

The transactions search returns the register’s own rows after the same cleaning, fifty at a time, with the median and middle half of everything that matched.

The price index is the average price per square foot of residential sales each month, smoothed over three months and set to 100 in January 2024, for the city and each community. It is published twice: for ready homes, which measures what existing homes sell for, and for all sales, which off-plan launches can lift without any existing home getting dearer. A community-month on fewer than 20 sales is left out.

Records that cannot be sales are removed at both ends. Prices below a quarter of the area’s typical price per square metre are share transfers; prices more than ten times above it are entry errors — one 3-bedroom flat is registered at AED 501 million. Genuine top-end homes sell at three to four times their area’s typical rate. And a “flat” registered at the size of a building — one studio is recorded at 4,618 m² for AED 100 million — is a whole-building transfer, so flats larger than any genuine home of their bedroom count are excluded too.

How accurate is a valuation?

The home value estimate applies the middle price per square foot of comparable recorded sales to a home’s size. Because every registered sale is a real price, the method can be tested: each sale is valued from its comparables with itself removed, and the estimate compared with what the home actually sold for. Measured on 20,911 valuations over twelve months (12 October 2026):

Building-level estimates land within 10% of the real price three times in four, in line with the best published valuation research (about 70% within 10% is the accepted benchmark). The method does not flatter sellers: half its errors are high and half low. It is weaker for unusually large homes, which it overvalues by about 19% on average; the tool warns when a home is much larger or smaller than those it is compared with. Floor, view, condition and upgrades are not in the register and are not adjusted for.

When a building has too few sales, the estimate widens to its area, and compares like with like: ready homes with ready sales, off-plan with off-plan, and homes within a quarter of the same size. The area figures above were re-measured on 2 November 2026 over 23,779 sales in six areas. Before that change, area estimates mixed off-plan launches with ready resales and valued ready homes about 23% too high.

Known limits

• The sales register in our database begins on 2 October 2023, so a project’s first recorded sale is not necessarily its launch.
• Ejari does not name buildings, so rents are by area and project, never by tower.
• DLD leaves the bedroom count blank on many villas, so villa figures are often by size rather than by bedroom.
• Very large result sets sometimes carry an estimated rather than exact count, and are labelled as estimates.
• Nothing on this site is a formal valuation, a forecast or advice. For a mortgage or legal purpose you need a RERA-registered valuer.