Dubai's Prime Quarter.

What the quarter showed

This is the first of my quarterly notes. Every figure below is a median taken from registered transactions, not an asking price and not a valuation. The charts carry the third quarter to date as well, marked with an asterisk, because two months of it were registered by the time I published.

The second quarter was softer than the first across every prime area I follow, on both price per square foot and the number of deals registered. The wider Dubai market was close to flat over the same period, so the softness sat in prime rather than across the city.

I publish the same areas every quarter so that the comparison holds, and I say plainly where the data does not reach. That matters more to me than a confident headline.

Price per square foot by area

Median AED per square foot

From the first quarter to the second, the median fell by about ten per cent on Palm Jumeirah, eight per cent in Downtown, fifteen per cent in Marina and JBR, and six per cent in Dubai Hills. Registered volumes fell further. Palm Jumeirah went from 327 sales to 211, Downtown from 566 to 363, Marina and JBR from 932 to 631, and Dubai Hills from 889 to 370.

Two things need saying before anyone reads that as a straight price fall. A median moves with the mix of what sold, so a quarter with more small apartments and fewer large ones shows a lower figure even if nothing repriced. The Downtown line is the clearest example: the fourth quarter of 2025 carried 654 off-plan registrations at a median of AED 2.0 million, which lifted the price per foot and then fell away. Read the direction rather than the exact percentage.

Off-plan and existing stock

Median AED per square foot, second quarter 2026

This is the number I am asked about most, and it is the reason the two markets are not substitutes. On Palm Jumeirah, off-plan registered at about 2.4 times the price per foot of existing stock in the same area. In Marina and JBR the multiple was similar. In Downtown it was about 1.4 times, and in Dubai Hills the two were within four per cent of each other.

Part of that gap is product. New waterfront schemes are larger, better specified and often branded, so they are not the same asset as a tower from 2010. Part of it is the payment structure: a buyer paying in stages to a 2029 handover is buying a different thing from a buyer paying in full today for a unit that is already earning. My own view is that the choice follows the objective rather than the price per foot. If you want the asset to produce income from the first month, existing stock does that and the entry per foot is lower. If you want staged payments, a new building and time before completion, off-plan does that and you pay for it. Where the two prices sit close together, as in Dubai Hills, the case for off-plan rests almost entirely on the payment plan and the product.

What existing stock yields

These are gross figures. They take no account of service charges, management, void periods or transaction costs, all of which matter and all of which I go through on a specific unit rather than in a table. The pattern is the ordinary one: the yield rises as the address becomes less expensive.

Rents themselves are worth a paragraph. On new contracts, the median rent per square foot fell in every area I follow between the first quarter and the third: Palm Jumeirah from 155 to 121, Downtown from 149 to 122, Marina and JBR from 121 to 102, and Dubai Hills from 153 to 121. Renewals held broadly flat over the same period. That combination usually means new supply reaching tenants while sitting tenants stay where they are.

The top of the market

Registered sales at or above AED 20 million, all Dubai

Fewer large deals are being registered, but the ones that complete are getting bigger. The median price of a sale above AED 20 million rose from about AED 30.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 to AED 33.2 million in the second quarter of 2026. The branded canal-front schemes registered as Jumeirah Second show the top of the range, with a median of about AED 10,145 per square foot in the second quarter on sixteen sales, and Aman Residences alone registering close to AED 14,000 per square foot. Sixteen sales is a small sample, so I would treat that as an indication of where the ceiling sits rather than a trend.

What I am seeing

I attended two off-plan launches during the period, one in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi. Both cleared quickly, one within hours and the other inside three days, on the developers' own figures. The buyers were a mixture of people already living in the UAE and buyers from overseas, with Indian and British nationals the two groups I saw most often.

That sits oddly beside the figures above, and the contrast is the part of the quarter I would pay attention to. Registered volumes in the established areas fell, while new launches cleared almost immediately. The money has not gone anywhere. It is going into new product rather than into what is already standing. This is not only my areas. On published figures drawn from Dubai Land Department data, ready-market transactions across Dubai fell by about 31 per cent in the first half of 2026 against the same period a year earlier, while off-plan took roughly 76 per cent of all sales, up from about 69 per cent.

The terms have moved as well. Payment plans have become easier, with more of the price falling after handover, and I am seeing the four per cent Dubai Land Department fee waived on a number of launches. A waived fee is real money saved, but the developer pays for it somewhere, usually in the headline price, so I would compare the total cost of two units rather than the incentive attached to one.

About these figures

Everything above is calculated from registered Dubai Land Department transactions, covering sales and rental contracts. I use medians rather than averages so that one very large deal does not move the figure. Land and whole-building registrations are excluded, as are records whose implied price per square foot falls outside a plausible band, because both distort a price per foot badly. Areas appear under their registration names, so Downtown is Burj Khalifa, Marina and JBR is Marsa Dubai, and Dubai Hills is Hadaeq Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid.

Coverage has limits worth knowing. The data is Dubai only. Abu Dhabi is registered separately, so Saadiyat Beach and Al Reem are not in these numbers, and neither is Ras Al Khaimah. The DIFC keeps its own property register inside the free zone, so DIFC sales do not appear here at all and I have left the district out rather than show a partial picture. The current quarter covers July and August only and is not comparable with a full quarter.