How we compare
A number is only useful if it's compared to the right thing
Dubai property is full of true numbers arranged into misleading comparisons. A launch price beside a market average. A yield built from one building's rent and another's price. A “15% growth” that counts a different set of homes at each end.
Keyva is built on 1,353,718 Dubai Land Department sale records and 3,459,820 registered Ejari tenancies. The data matters less than the discipline applied to it: compare like with like, and say nothing when you can't.
What that means in practice
A developer's “from” price against an area median
A starting price is the cheapest unit in a development. A median is the middle of what sold. Subtracting one from the other understates the real gap on a comparable home — so we show both figures and say they are not like-for-like, rather than printing a tidy premium percentage.
Both numbers, side by side, labelled by what they are
Rental yield from mismatched sources
DLD files sale records under community names like Dubai Marina, and tenancy records under official sectors like Marsa Dubai. Taken at face value, that produced 74 areas with sales and no rents — and no yield at all for most of the places people actually search.
The two are joined only where shared projects prove they describe the same place, and where a sector spans several communities, the page says the rent side is broader
Year-on-year change from a sample too thin to carry it
Keyva holds 20 years of monthly price history, so the comparison is available almost everywhere — but availability is not the same as meaning. An area with nine sales this quarter against six a year ago can produce any percentage you like, and the arithmetic will not tell you it is noise.
The comparison is published only where both ends clear the minimum sample, and the sample count is shown beside it
Rent trends from months we only partly captured
DLD's exports filter by registration date, so our first rent download captured old contracts only if they were registered late — Dubai-wide it read as 717 tenancies in January 2025 climbing to 68,862 a year later, explosive growth that was really our own coverage arriving. The full archive since loaded does not have that bias, but the guard it taught remains: a month far thinner than its neighbours is dropped from trends as partial coverage.
Those months are dropped from trends entirely, because a biased sample is not a smaller sample
Bulk leases counted as homes
One Ejari contract can cover forty units at a single price. Averaged in with individual tenancies, that quietly drags every median it touches. Roughly one in five of the contracts in the full Ejari archive is a bulk lease.
Excluded and counted, not divided and hoped over
A developer's average price read as a quality premium
A builder's raw price per square foot mostly measures which areas they build in. Ellington posts the highest headline figure of any developer in our records, AED 2,760 per square foot — but compared against the same areas with the same completion status, their homes sell within 2% of the local market. Sobha, whose headline number is lower, commands 27%. DAMAC, the largest by volume, trades about 5% below.
Every developer measured only against sales in the same area with the same off-plan or ready status, with the raw figure shown beside it
Off-plan and ready stock averaged into one median
These are two different markets. Over the last twelve months of our own DLD records, off-plan trades about 27% above completed homes city-wide — AED 1,796 per square foot against AED 1,417. By area the gap is nothing like uniform: across the 51 areas carrying at least thirty registered sales on each side, the middle one shows 35%, and the range runs from roughly 7% to over 100%. Palm Jumeirah's off-plan stock records AED 5,534 per square foot against AED 2,635 for ready homes. Since off-plan is now the majority of Dubai sales, a blended median mostly tracks the off-plan side while appearing to describe the whole market.
Both medians shown separately on every area, with the gap between them stated
Land blended into home prices
A plot of raw land and a two-bedroom apartment are both DLD transactions. Averaged together they produced area medians as low as AED 5 per square foot, which is not the price of anything a person can live in.
Residential stock only, on both the sale and rent sides
Why we would rather show nothing
A blank where a number should be looks like a worse product. It is a better one. Every figure Keyva declines to show is a figure a competitor is prepared to guess at, and a buyer is entitled to assume both were measured the same way. When something here is missing, the page says why — and usually says what would have to be true for it to appear.