Which Dubai property investments worked, 2020 to 2026
Every unit that sold twice tells us what its owner made. We matched 65,153 of those round trips, held for a year or more, out of 656,500 cleaned sales, and ranked them by type, size, area, developer, entry price and year.
The agent's view
“I price every home here from what actually sold in the same tower and layout, never from the asking price.”
Villas, bought ready, at the cheap end of their own community, did best. Hotel apartments and branded off-plan towers did worst.
Worked
Villas and townhouses: 14.5% a year against 9.1% for apartments. Only 3.7% of villa resales lost money.
Ready stock: 12.2% a year when bought and sold ready, against 8.1% for off-plan flipped before handover.
The cheapest fifth of each building: 15.3% a year. The dearest fifth made 7.8% and lost money three times as often.
Three and four bedrooms: 13.5% a year against 8.4% for studios.
Established communities: The Springs, Tilal Al Ghaf, Villanova, Greens, Discovery Gardens, JBR, Dubai Marina.
Did not work
Hotel apartments: 7.3% a year and 23% of resales at a loss. In Business Bay, 44% lost.
High-supply apartment districts: Mohammed Bin Rashid City 5.2% a year, Dubai Land Residence Complex 5.5%, Meydan 6.9%, Business Bay 7.9%.
Paying the launch premium: off-plan sells about 31% above ready stock of the same area, type and size.
Flips under a year: 37% made less than the 6% it costs to buy and sell.
Yield-led developers for growth: Samana, Danube, Sobha and Azizi resales trailed the market by 3 to 6 points a year.
Trend
Prices rose about 85% from early 2020 to a peak in the first quarter of 2026. They have slipped since, and sales volume has fallen by a third.
Price index, like-for-like, Q1 2020 = 100
Hover for values. Mix-adjusted index controls for area, type, bedrooms and off-plan status. Same-unit index uses only units that sold twice.
Mix-adjusted, all salesSame-unit resales
Sales per quarter
Count of cleaned sales in the database. Q4 2026 left out (8 days only).
Villas led: their index reached 247 against 181 for apartments. From the peak, the mix-adjusted index is down 1.6% and the same-unit index down 4.7%. Third-quarter 2026 sales were 31,154 against 46,724 a year before, and value fell from AED 105bn to AED 64bn. Off-plan was 72% of sales.
Checked against the Land Department on 9 Oct 2026: it registered 58,803 sales in the third quarter of 2025 and 37,496 in the third quarter of 2026, a fall of 36%. Our database shows 33%. The second quarter fell 28%; the first quarter rose 5%.
Where the softening is
Prime waterfront and central districts are falling. Affordable districts are still rising.
Ready apartments, median price per sq ft, Apr–Oct 2026 against Apr–Sep 2025
Areas with 60 or more sales in each window. Three areas with a change of mix removed.
Type, route, size
What you bought mattered more than when you bought it.
By property type
Median gain per year
By route
Status at purchase → status at sale
By bedrooms
Median gain per year
By year of purchase
Later years hold fewer, shorter round trips
All four differences are statistically firm (Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney, p below 0.0001; the 95% interval on the villa median is 14.3% to 14.7%, on apartments 9.0% to 9.2%). Off-plan buyers pay in stages, so their return on cash paid in is higher than the price gain shown here. The data does not hold payment plans.
Entry price
The strongest single factor is what you paid against your neighbours.
Gain per year by entry price within the same building and year
Each purchase ranked by its price per sq ft against the building median that year, then split into fifths
In a regression of return above market, paying 10% less per sq ft than the building median added about 2 points a year. Type added 4.3 points for a villa, ready status 2.6 points, each extra bedroom 1 point. Area explains 11% of the spread in returns. The building explains 36%. Choosing the building matters three times as much as choosing the district.
Distribution of gain per year, all 65,153 round trips
Bars to the left of zero are losses before costs. Ends clipped at −30% and +60%.
Locations
Total return by area: price gain plus rent.
Price gain is the median yearly gain on resales in the area. Yield is today's asking rent over the last 12 months of ready sales in the same building and bedroom count. High-yield areas grew less (rank correlation −0.56), so the two rarely stack.
Price gain per yearGross asking yield
Yields
Yield falls as price rises. Studios in mid-market districts pay most.
Highest gross asking yields
Area and type, 8 or more building-bedroom groups
Lowest gross asking yields
Same basis
Apartments: studio 8.2%, one bed 7.4%, two bed 6.9%, three bed 6.2%. Villas 5.6%. Across 1,842 building-bedroom groups the rank correlation between yield and price per sq ft is −0.62. These are asking rents with no service charge, vacancy or furnishing taken off. Net yield is about 1.5 to 2.5 points lower.
Developers
Community builders beat tower brands on resale. Tower brands pay more rent.
Resale return above or below the Dubai market, points per year
Median of each round trip's gain less the market's move over the same quarters. 150 or more round trips each.
Yields run the other way: Samana 8.1%, Danube 7.8%, Azizi 7.6%, Binghatti 7.2%, Sobha 6.6%, Damac 6.5%, Emaar 5.7%. Binghatti is the one tower brand ahead on both.
Each name is a brand in the building name or the master community, and covers 52% of sales. Checked against 714 Land Department projects: brand names (Binghatti, Azizi, Danube, Samana, Sobha) agree with the register. Community names are the master developer, not always the builder: some Dubai Hills towers are by Fortimo or Soho. The developer is a verified field for Business Bay, where Binghatti and Select Group led and The First Group, Arabian Gulf Properties and Damac's Paramount towers trailed.
Buildings
Best and worst buildings for resale.
Best 15
Worst 15
30 or more round trips each, held a year or more. "vs market" is points per year above or below the Dubai same-unit index over the same quarters. Four buildings with a median above 60% a year (Imperial Avenue, Marina Star, Bali Residences, Burj View Residence) are left out: the first recorded price looks like a part payment.
Method and limits
How the numbers were made.
Source: 670,453 unit sales, 2 Jan 2020 to 8 Oct 2026, 3,443 buildings and communities. Land, whole buildings, bulk transfers and prices outside AED 250 to 20,000 per sq ft removed: 656,500 kept.
Round trips: the same unit number in the same building, sold twice in a row, with the same size (within 0.5%) and bedrooms, a changed price, 30 days or more apart, and a gain between −60% and +300%. 92,224 pairs; 65,153 held a year or more are used for every ranking.
Gain per year is compound. All gains are before the 4% transfer fee, agent fee, service charge, mortgage cost and rent received.
Survivor effect: only units that resold are counted. Owners who are waiting for a better price are not in the losses.
Yields use one reading of rental adverts (6 to 7 Oct 2026), not signed contracts.
Not complete: the database holds about 80% of the sales the Land Department registered (48 Business Bay towers have none). Area price-per-sq-ft medians move with the mix of what sold; the round-trip figures do not.
Written by Dalia, an AI data analyst. No person has reviewed this page yet. Past results, not a forecast and not advice.
