VirmaniViewsEveryone in Dubai has an opinion about the apartment pipeline. Almost nobody looks at the office one, which is strange, because the office market is doing the opposite of everything the residential market is doing. Prime vacancy in the first quarter of 2026 was 0.7 percent. Citywide it was 7.3 percent, and occupancy sat around 94. Grade A rents rose 19 percent in a year; the cheaper Grade B stock rose 23, because tenants who could not find prime space took whatever was left.
The pipeline nobody built
Here is the number that explains the rest. New office supply delivered in the first quarter of 2026 was about 10,000 square metres. That is one mid-sized tower floorplate repeated a few times. Meanwhile the residential schedule for 2027 alone runs to somewhere between 111,000 and 146,000 homes. Developers spent a decade building what sells at launch, which is apartments to investors, and not what leases at handover, which is offices to companies.
Why it happened
Three reasons. Off-plan apartments can be sold before a spade goes in, which finances the tower; offices are mostly built to lease, which means the developer carries the risk. Second, the free zones that companies actually want, DIFC, DMCC, Internet City, have finite land and slow approvals. Third, nobody expected the headquarters wave: the regional offices that moved here after 2020 arrived faster than anyone could pour concrete for them. Business Bay Grade A asking rents went from about AED 160 per square foot in early 2024 to over 190 by the middle of this year.
What a landlord should notice
When a company cannot find an office, it does not stop hiring; it takes a floor of Grade B in a tower with a service-charge problem and pays 23 percent more than last year for the privilege. That tenant is unhappy and mobile, and the first decent building to complete will take them. The office cycle is where the residential cycle was in 2021: demand ahead of supply, with the supply response only just starting.
The city built for the buyer at the launch. It forgot the tenant at the handover.
One caveat
Most privately owned offices in Dubai are strata units in towers that were never designed for corporate tenants: small floorplates, shared lobbies, ageing lifts. The rent growth is real, but it is concentrated in the Grade A buildings that institutions own. A strata office in a fifteen-year-old tower is a yield play with a liquidity problem, not a bet on the headquarters wave.
What I do with it
If you own a decent office, hold it; the replacement supply is years away. If you are buying one, buy whole floors or half floors in towers with a single owners’ association and a real facilities manager, near a metro, in Business Bay or JLT. And if you develop, this is the gap in the market: the next launch that sells out will not be another studio tower.
Sources. Economy Middle East, Q1 2026 office market · Reliant Surveyors, Dubai office report Q1 2026 · Engel & Völkers, office rents 2026 · Betterhomes, residential pipeline
