VirmaniViewsReal estate, Dubai,and the thingsworth keeping.
Twelve years selling property in the UAE. This is where I write down what I tell clients across the table, before any contract appears.
One number. The whole market in it.
of Dubai’s prime office space is empty.
Office vacancy and rents, Q1 2026: Reliant Surveyors, Cushman & Wakefield Core via Economy Middle East.
1Prime is full
Seven in a hundred desks are free across the city. In the towers companies actually want, it is fewer than one.
2So rents did this
Tenants who could not find prime space took the cheaper stock and paid a fifth more for it.
The market, minus the brochure.
Dubai is moving its front door
A $35 billion airport, a million-resident city around it, and what that does to a property map. The corridor matters more than the runway.
Read the viewOffices are the scarce asset
Dubai is building homes by the hundred thousand and offices by the hectare. Prime vacancy is under one percent. The quiet side of the market, in four charts.
Read the viewHow a key actually arrives
Between your deposit and your front door sit an escrow bank, an independent engineer, a regulator and a snagging list. The handover machine, drawn out.
Read the viewTwo Palms
Palm Jebel Ali is twice the size of the original, 60 percent cheaper per square foot, and eighteen months from its first keys. What the first Palm’s twenty years say about buying into the second.
Read the viewThirty-two trillion
D33 is Dubai’s ten-year economic plan. Strip the announcement, and it is a forecast of how many people will need a desk and a bed. Read it that way.
Read the viewWhat I tell clients before the contract.
Five numbers I draw on a napkin more often than I would like to admit. Each one has a full view behind it.
Salaries buy lifestyles. Assets buy freedom.
The curve is flat for years, then suddenly it is not. Most people sell in the flat part. Wealthy ones refuse to interrupt the compounding.
A 15 percent price move on an AED 2M off-plan unit, with 20 percent paid in, returns about 52 percent on the cash actually invested, after the 4 percent transfer fee and selling costs.
Five dials, read together.
A deal is never cheap on its own. It is cheap against these five, or it is just discounted.
Dubai front-loads its costs. You pay to get in, and then the meter largely stops.
Sixty before handover, forty after. The longer the tail after keys, the less the market’s mood in between can hurt you.
Indicative figures from my own client work, rounded for the napkin. Each card opens the full view with the working.
Four rules for Dubai property. Learned the expensive way.
Not slogans. Each one is a mistake I have watched a client make, or made myself, in this market specifically.
Service charges decide the yield, not the listing.
A 7 percent headline yield on a tower charging AED 25 per square foot is closer to 5.5 percent after charges, and under 4 after everything else. Ask for the last two years of charges before you ask for the price.
Read the charges firstOff-plan is a bet on the developer, not the district.
Delivery history, escrow milestones and the payment tail after handover matter more than the render or the road. A great location handed over four years late is a bad investment.
Developer before designPrice the deal against the whole board.
Population, supply pipeline, the price index, net yield and the off-plan share, read together, before the unit. A 10 percent discount in a district taking ten thousand keys in 2027 is not a discount. The same price in a community with schools and no new supply is.
Cheap versus discountedLeverage lives in the payment plan, not the bank.
Twenty percent in on a good plan turns a 15 percent price move into roughly 50 percent on your cash, and a 15 percent drop into a wipeout. Flip only what you could afford to keep to handover, and only in a tower you would be happy to own.
Return on equity, both ways
I sell what I write about.
I read Mathematics and Economics at Boston University, then came home to Dubai to run The Virmani Group, the firm my father started from a small office in Ajman in 2014. Twelve years on, the work is unchanged: matching people with the right property across the UAE.
Everything here comes from that desk. The calls I got right, the ones I did not, and what separates the two.
One good email, now and then.
No content calendar and no growth hacks. A letter arrives when I have something worth your attention, and not before.
- 1One market note. What is actually moving in UAE property, and why.
- 2One honest take. The call I would make with my own money.
- 3One thing worth keeping. A book, a walk, a number.
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The first letter goes out when it is worth sending. Until then, the Views are all here.