VirmaniViewsBetween January and June this year, Dubai registered property sales worth AED 286 billion across roughly 86,000 deals. Count every registered transaction, mortgages and gifts included, and the figure is AED 420 billion. It was the second-strongest first half the city has ever recorded, behind only 2025.
A number that big stops meaning anything unless you break it. So here it is, broken.
Where the money went
Of the residential total, AED 168 billion was off-plan and AED 58 billion was ready property. Apartments were 84 percent of all residential deals by count. In other words: the market is mostly people buying apartments that are not finished yet.
- AED 168.2bn off-plan, 60,425 deals
- AED 57.5bn ready, 21,436 deals
June, on its own
The month that closed the half was the busiest of the year: 13,766 deals worth AED 32.7 billion in thirty days. That is more than AED 1 billion of property changing hands every day, including Fridays. It did that in the first weeks of summer, when half the city is in London or Mumbai.
The apartment problem
Eighty-four percent of residential deals were apartments, and the overwhelming majority of those were off-plan. Villas and townhouses were a sliver of the count and a much larger share of the conversation, because that is where the shortage is. When 68,000 apartment deals chase a city that is adding families, prices in the two segments stop moving together. Ordinary towers flatten. Family homes in communities with schools do not.
What the shape says
Two things at once. First, demand is real: eighty-odd thousand sales in six months is not a market waiting for permission. Second, the ready market is getting thin. Fewer finished homes are being sold, partly because owners are holding, partly because the homes being sold today were bought off-plan two years ago and have not been handed over yet.
Volume tells you the city is busy. The off-plan share tells you the city is busy buying the future.
One caveat
Sales value is not price growth. AED 286 billion can be a lot of homes at flat prices or fewer homes at rising ones, and this half was mostly the first. Off-plan launches are priced by developers, not by the last sale, so a record half can coexist with a secondary market where a two-year-old apartment sells for exactly what it cost. Read the volume as confidence, not as appreciation. Those are different bets, and only one of them is guaranteed by a crowd.
What I do with it
If you own a finished home in an established community, you are sitting on the scarce side of this chart. Do not be rushed into selling it to fund a launch. If you are buying, the second chart is your map: the crowd is in off-plan apartments, which means the least crowded corner of the market is a ready villa or townhouse with a tenant in it. The crowd sets the price where it stands. Patience shops where it does not.
Sources. Dubai Land Department, Q1 2026 release · Emirates 24|7 on DLD H1 2026 data · Reliant Surveyors, H1 2026 · REIDIN, off-plan vs ready H1 2025 vs H1 2026
