Dubai property prices down 4.7% since the war, says new weekly index built from Land Department records

Dubai home prices have fallen 4.7 per cent per square foot since the war with Iran reached the city in March, and the number of homes changing hands each month is down by a quarter, according to a new weekly index built from the Dubai Land Department’s public register of sales.

The Dubai Property Index was launched this month by Natalie Burešová, a Senior Advisor at The Oppenheim Group UAE, the Dubai office of the Los Angeles brokerage known from the television series Selling Sunset. It is free to read at natalieburesova.com, rebuilt every week from the Land Department’s open data with no manual step between the register and the page, and published in English and Czech with a Monday email alert.

What the register shows

The current edition covers 105,662 residential sales registered between January and September 2026, worth AED 212 billion, roughly £44 billion. The median price paid per square foot across all of them was AED 1,689 over the latest three complete months, against AED 1,772 in January and February, the last two months before the war. Sales fell further than prices: 10,733 homes a month now, against 14,280 before.

The fall has been uneven. Villas lost 13.3 per cent per square foot while flats lost 3.3 per cent. The prime districts led the way down, with Business Bay off 20.4 per cent, Palm Jumeirah 16.4 per cent and Downtown Dubai 11 per cent, while the mass-market suburbs barely moved. Dubai South, a district of new launches near the Expo site, became the busiest place in the city to buy a home, with 13,159 registered sales this year, and off-plan purchases now account for 74 per cent of everything registered.

The index presents the figures by month, by community, by number of bedrooms and by project, with a sortable table of the 40 communities that have recorded at least 120 sales both before and after the war. Every figure is a median of registered sale prices rather than an average or an asking price, so a handful of trophy transactions cannot move it, and duplicate registrations and implausible records are removed before anything is counted.

British interest has halved

Alongside the index, Burešová published research into what buyers abroad are looking for. Google searches for Dubai property from the UK fell 44 per cent between last winter and this summer, her analysis of search data found, and the questions changed: British searchers who had been asking how to buy began asking whether prices were falling. The index was built to answer that question with the register rather than with a brochure.

For Scottish and other UK investors the practical change is that the registered price of a two-bedroom flat in a named community, and its movement since the spring, can now be read on one page before a conversation with any agent. The data behind each table can be downloaded in full.

Who is behind it

Burešová is Czech-born, studied anthropology and lived in London before moving to Dubai, and much of her work is with buyers purchasing from the UK and central Europe. Her commentary on the Dubai market has appeared in Hospodářské noviny, iDNES.cz and Podnikatel.cz, and her record is set out line by line on her verified facts page at Ascribed. Her own site, natalieburesova.com, carries the index, the Czech edition and her guides for buyers from the UK and Europe. Edinburgh Business News carries her contributor profile.

The next edition of the index is to add registered rents and gross yields by community from the Land Department’s tenancy contracts, and an Abu Dhabi series will follow when transaction-level data for the capital is published.

Disclosure: the website that hosts the Dubai Property Index was built by Domain Farm Ltd, the publisher of this title, for Natalie Burešová as a client. The figures quoted are from the published index and the Dubai Land Department’s open data.