VirmaniViewsIn 2020 Dubai sold thirty homes for more than $10 million. In 2025 it sold five hundred, worth $9.05 billion, and no other city came close. In the last quarter of the year alone it closed 143 such deals; Hong Kong, in second place, managed 81. The first half of 2026 added another 296, worth $5.1 billion, up 14 percent on the year. The top of the market is not a niche any more. It is the engine.
Why the top matters to everyone else
Because it sets the price of land. A developer who can sell a Palm Jumeirah villa plot at a number that would have been absurd in 2019 will pay more for the next plot, and that cost flows into every launch behind it. Super-prime is also the most cash-driven segment in the market. Very few of these five hundred buyers borrowed, which means the top end is the last part of the market to feel a rate move and the first to feel a change in global sentiment.
The buyers have changed as much as the count. In 2020 the ten-million-dollar deal was a Gulf family or a European moving a second home. By 2025 the pool included founders from India and Asia, funds buying whole floors, and a growing number of residents trading up from a AED 15 million villa to a AED 40 million one. Knight Frank’s Wealth Report puts Dubai in the world’s top five cities by the number of dollar millionaires living in it, and that resident base, not visiting money, is what makes five hundred deals a year repeatable.
Where it lives
Three addresses take most of it: Palm Jumeirah, Emirates Hills and Jumeirah Bay, with Dubai Hills and the new islands rising fast. That geography matters because super-prime demand is location-locked in a way the rest of the market is not. A buyer with $15 million does not shop Business Bay because the Palm got expensive. So the top end can keep climbing while ordinary apartments flatten, and this year it has.
Thirty to five hundred in five years is a city changing what it is for.
One caveat
Five hundred is a large number for a category and a tiny number for a city that transacts eighty-odd thousand homes in a half. Do not read the super-prime boom as a signal about your two-bedroom in JVC. The two markets share a land department and not much else.
What I do with it
If you are buying at the top, buy the address, not the finish; the address is what the next buyer is paying for. If you are not, watch this segment as a barometer of global money and nothing more. When the ten-million-dollar count falls two quarters in a row, that is when I get careful about everything else.
Sources. Knight Frank, record 500 $10m+ sales in 2025 · Construction Week, Knight Frank 2025 report · Dubai Standard, 296 sales in H1 2026 · Gulf News, 219 deals in 2022 · Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026 summary
