How We Read the Dubai Land Department Register

Where the data comes from

We use two Dubai Land Department open-data endpoints. The first is the project register, which records every off-plan project filed with the DLD: developer, area, declared value, registered unit count, escrow account status, construction percentage and the contractual completion date. The second is the transaction register, which records completed property sales: price paid, area, unit size, room count, property type and whether the sale was off-plan. Both are public, both are published by the Dubai Land Department, and neither requires a commercial licence to read. We query them directly rather than through an intermediary, take a dated snapshot each day, and retain those snapshots so that any figure we have published can be traced back to the exact dataset it came from. Nothing on this site is scraped from a portal, supplied by a developer, or estimated where the register is silent.

How the numbers are calculated

Project counts are straightforward: we count rows in the register for the relevant year, filtered by developer or area where stated. Unit counts and declared values are summed from the register's own fields. Escrow status is read directly from the register's escrow flag — we do not infer it. Transaction figures need slightly more care. We aggregate every recorded off-plan sale by project name, then report the median price rather than the mean, because a handful of penthouse sales will drag a mean upward and misrepresent what a typical buyer paid. Price per square foot is calculated per transaction from the recorded value and the recorded area, converted from square metres, and then the median of those is taken — not the median price divided by the median size, which would give a different and less honest answer. Where a development is registered in phases (Azizi Venice runs to sixteen), we aggregate the phases and say so on the page. Sibling projects are matched on significant word tokens, never on substrings, because substring matching produced a genuine false positive during development: "Avelia at The Valley" contains "lia" and would otherwise have absorbed an unrelated project called LIA.

What this data cannot tell you

Four real limits, and they constrain what any honest analysis of this source can claim. First, the open data covers the current registration year only. Requests for 2025 and earlier return an empty result, so we cannot show multi-year trends, and any site claiming a DLD-sourced historical series is not using this source. Second, every off-plan transaction carries a single procedure type, so a developer's first sale cannot be distinguished from a resale or an assignment. When we report transaction counts we are counting all off-plan sales, not new sales, and we say so. Third, unit counts are missing on some registered projects — villa and townhouse clusters frequently register with a zero unit count — so a total that sums registered units will understate true supply in villa-heavy districts. Fourth, the register reflects filings, not reality on the ground: a completion date is the date filed, a construction percentage is the percentage reported. We treat both as claims made to a regulator, which is more reliable than marketing but is not the same as verified fact.

The escrow figure, explained

The number we are asked about most is that 102 of the 359 projects registered in Dubai in 2026 — 28% — had no open escrow account at the time of checking. Here is exactly what that means. Under Dubai's off-plan framework, a developer must open a project escrow account before units in that project can lawfully be sold; buyer payments go into that account rather than to the developer directly. The register carries a flag for whether the account is open. We count the rows where that flag is false. That is the entire calculation. What the figure does not mean is that 28% of Dubai projects are fraudulent or in breach. Escrow accounts commonly open within weeks of a project being registered, and the interval between registration and escrow is ordinary administrative sequencing. The reason the number matters is that marketing does not wait for it: brochures, prices and floor plans routinely circulate before the account opens, and a buyer has no way of knowing from that material which side of the line a project sits on. The figure is a snapshot and it moves. We date every publication of it, and anyone can check a specific project themselves against the register.

How to verify anything we publish

Take any figure from this site and check it. The Dubai Land Department publishes the underlying data openly, and every number we report carries the date of the snapshot it came from. For a specific project, the fastest route is to ask the developer or broker for the project number and escrow account number in writing, then confirm both against the DLD register — a screenshot supplied by a broker is not verification. For aggregate figures, the endpoints named above return the same rows to anyone who queries them. If you find a discrepancy between something we have published and what the register currently says, the most likely explanation is that the register has moved since our snapshot; the second most likely is that we have made an error. We would rather hear about the second. Corrections are made on the page itself with the change noted, not quietly.

Independence

This site earns no commission on any property transaction. It does not list units for sale, does not represent developers, and is not paid for coverage or placement. That matters to the method, because the findings that make this data worth publishing — escrow accounts that are not open, registered completion dates years later than the marketed ones, advertised entry prices well below what buyers actually pay — are precisely the findings a site earning commission has no incentive to surface. Where we get something wrong, we correct it. Where the data does not support a conclusion, we say the data does not support it rather than filling the gap with an opinion.