Eight months into the regional crisis, Dubai's property market in numbers

"Is Dubai still a good place to buy?" is the question agents hear most often since the regional crisis began in late February and unsettled markets across the Gulf. Eight months on, there is enough data to answer it with numbers rather than impressions.

The short version: the market is quieter and cheaper than at its peak, but it has not stopped. Deals are down by a quarter to a half depending on the measure, prices have adjusted by roughly 5–15%, the luxury segment is still trading, and in late October a UAE developer sold bonds to investors for the first time since the crisis began.

Fewer deals

The clearest change is in the number of transactions.

• Monthly sales: citing Land Department data, S&P Global Ratings says Dubai averaged 12,644 sale transactions a month from March to September — 26% fewer than the 17,198 a month of January and February, before the crisis.
• The third quarter: Cavendish Maxwell counted Dh72.6 billion of home sales from July to September, 47% less than a year earlier, across about 34,000 deals, down 38%.
• Nine months: 112,580 residential transactions worth Dh292 billion, down 23% in number and 27% in value on the same period of 2025, by the same count.
• Ten months: Land Department figures for January to October put all real estate transactions at Dh624.8 billion — about 68% of 2025's full-year total of Dh919 billion. October alone brought Dh34.12 billion of sales across 11,610 deals.

Part of the third-quarter fall is timing. Ronan Arthur of Cavendish Maxwell points out that a sale is registered weeks after it is agreed, so the quarter mixes recent buying with deals struck earlier, and that buyers became more cautious in the weeks and months after the crisis began.

Off-plan still dominates: it made up 65% of the value of home sales and 72% of the deals in the third quarter.

Lower prices, but not a crash

Prices have moved less than volumes.

• Across the market: industry reports cited by S&P show prices 5% to 15% lower between the end of 2025 and September. S&P expects a gradual correction rather than a rapid fall, with apartments falling faster than villas because more apartments are due to be completed.
• Emaar's view: speaking at the AIM Congress in Dubai in September, Emaar founder Mohamed Alabbar put the adjustment at 5–10% and said the market could move quickly once the situation settles.
• Prime areas: Knight Frank says prices across Dubai's ten prime neighbourhoods fell 5% between the second and third quarters — the first quarterly fall since 2020. On Palm Jumeirah, prices are down 9.1% over twelve months, to about Dh4,083 per sq ft.
• Asking prices: Bayut's third-quarter data show asking prices broadly steady in most popular areas, with moves under 3%.

The last two points together are the practical story for agents. Registered prices in several areas have come down, while many sellers' asking prices have not. That gap is where negotiations happen now.

Luxury is still trading

The top of the market has slowed but has not frozen. Knight Frank counted 86 sales of homes worth $10 million or more in the third quarter — 17% fewer than a year earlier and about a third fewer than in the second quarter.

Over nine months, 412 homes above $10 million were sold — 15% more than in the same period of 2025, worth about $6.67 billion. After Palm Jumeirah, the busiest areas for such deals were Jumeirah, Emirates Hills, Dubai Hills Estate and Jumeirah Golf Estates.

Faisal Durrani, Knight Frank's head of research for the Middle East and North Africa, calls the ongoing regional tension the biggest drag on overall market activity and says its stop-start nature weighs on confidence. His colleague Louis Harding says that with prices easing, Palm Jumeirah is increasingly offering good value.

Investors are lending to developers again

The newest signal comes from the debt market. In late October, Sharjah developer Arada sold a $400 million five-year sukuk — the first public debt sale by a UAE developer since the crisis began. It priced at a 9% yield after investors placed more than $650 million of orders, and half of the money refinances older debt.

The contrast with the spring is sharp. In March, six dollar bonds of Binghatti and Omniyat traded at distressed levels, more than 10 percentage points above US Treasuries, and the spread on Arada's own 2030 bond more than doubled. The new sukuk priced about three percentage points below that 2030 bond. Developers' access to funding matters to buyers: it pays for construction and for the launches that bring new stock.

What to watch next

Cavendish Maxwell expects activity in the coming months to depend on three things: how often developers launch projects, how the regional situation develops, and how quickly buyers' behaviour returns to normal. S&P expects more resale listings as investors sell after prices have fallen, and the biggest effect on sentiment in the luxury market.