Insights · Dubai · 21 August 2026 · 5 min
Off-plan is now 73% of Dubai sales. Here's what that means for a UK buyer.
Three in four Dubai property sales this year are off-plan. The headline sounds like a warning. The detail — the off-plan premium has collapsed from 66% to 19% — changes what you should actually do.
In 2025 Dubai recorded 116,484 residential sales worth AED 327 billion. Two-thirds of those transactions, and 68% of the money, were off-plan — homes bought before they exist. So far in 2026 the share has risen again: 73% by volume and by value.
Most commentary stops there and calls it froth. We'd rather look at the price per square foot, because that's what decides whether an individual buyer is overpaying.
The premium has gone
In 2019 the median off-plan square foot cost AED 1,353 against AED 815 for ready stock — a 66% premium for a promise. In 2021 the two lines nearly crossed. Today off-plan sits at AED 1,762 and ready at AED 1,484: a 19% gap, the narrowest since the data begins in 2014.
That tells you the market has repriced ready property upward far faster than it has repriced launches. The old logic — buy off-plan because it's cheap and sell into completion — is mostly gone. Off-plan is no longer an entry discount. It is a financing structure.
So why buy off-plan at all?
Because of the payment plan, the stock, and the developer. A 60/40 or 70/30 plan lets a UK investor control a dollar-pegged asset for a fraction of its price during the build, with no UK stamp duty and no mortgage application. The best units — floor, view, layout — are only ever available at launch. And the right developer's launches have, on the evidence, been resold at a median gain of 20–31% within a year.
None of that argues for buying any launch. It argues for buying the right one, at developer price, through someone whose fee the developer pays.
What we do with this
We underwrite every Dubai unit against ready comparables in the same community — if the launch price per square foot is more than a modest premium over completed stock next door, the payment plan has to justify the difference or we pass. We model the exit at today's ready price, not at a projected one. And we say so in writing before you reserve.
Data: DXB Interact (Dubai Land Department transactions), accessed 21 August 2026; 2026 figures are year to date. Our reading of it is our own.