How every number is made

Sales come from the Dubai Land Department's open transactions register: every registered sale, with its date, price, registered area in square metres, property type, area, project and building as recorded by the DLD.

Rents come from Ejari, the DLD's tenancy contract register, via the same open data programme: contract start, annual rent, property type and area.

Broker licences come from the DLD's open register of real estate brokers.

Nothing is taken from property portals, listings, asking prices, developer price lists or agent submissions. If it was not registered, it is not in a report.

Reports cover residential sales only. Records the DLD marks as commercial or industrial are excluded; land plots are excluded. Property types are grouped as Apartments (units) and Villas & Townhouses.

Currently in the database: 279 areas, 111 communities, 5,902 buildings, 1,071,742 residential sales and 284,017 new rental contracts in the aggregated history.

Areas are the DLD's registry areas. The register spells the same place several ways (for example Marsa Dubai and Dubai Marina); every spelling is mapped to one canonical name so the whole history counts together.

Communities are the DLD's master projects, such as Dubai Harbour or Al Furjan. A community gets its own report once it has at least thirty registered residential sales. It is filed under the area where most of its sales are registered.

Buildings are the DLD's building names within an area, normalised the same way. A building carries a report when it has recorded residential sales in the last three complete months.

Medians, never averages. Every price, price per square metre, rent and size in a report is the median (the middle value) of the records in that month. Medians are not pulled by a single penthouse or a mispriced record.

Outlier trimming. Within each area and property type, sale records whose price per square metre falls below the 1st or above the 99th percentile of that group are excluded before anything is computed. Records with no registered size are kept in the price median but cannot enter the per-square-metre median.

Complete months only. A month is shown only after it has ended and the DLD export covers it. The headline month of a report is the latest complete month.

Small samples. A month resting on fewer than thirty sales still shows its median, with a note saying how many sales it rests on. Off-plan and ready medians need at least five sales on each side; bedroom rows need at least five records.

Change on last year compares the headline month with the same month a year earlier, on price per square metre, so a change in the mix of unit sizes does not masquerade as a price move.

The Dubai median used as a benchmark is computed across every residential sale in the emirate for the same month and property type, with the same trimming.

Rental figures use new Ejari registrations only. Renewals are excluded, because a renewal reflects the rent agreed years ago plus a capped increase, not what the market asks today.

Gross yield is the median annual rent of new contracts divided by the median sale price for the same area, month and property type. It is indicative: it does not account for service charges, fees, vacancy or financing, and a median rent and a median price are rarely the same unit.

The DLD marks each sale as an off-plan or a ready (completed) registration. Reports show the off-plan share of a month's sales and, where both sides have at least five records, the median price per square metre on each side.

Bedroom counts come from the DLD's rooms field on sales and Ejari's property sub-type on rentals. The two registers label rooms differently; both are read into studio, one, two, three, four and five-plus bedrooms. Rows with fewer than five records are not shown.

A building report lists the building's registered sales over the last twenty-four months, as recorded: date, bedrooms, size, price and price per square metre. Unit numbers and floors are not published by the DLD and do not appear.

Comparables for a client's unit are the building's registered sales with the same bedroom count and a registered size within seven percent of the client's (widened to twelve percent when fewer than three match), newest first. They are evidence, not a valuation.

The DLD publishes with a lag of one to three months and continues to add late registrations to past months, so a recent month can change slightly between refreshes. Every report states the export date it was built from.

Sales are current through September 2, 2026. Rents are current through August 21, 2026.

When an agent enters a RERA broker registration number (BRN), it is checked against the DLD's open brokers register. A letterhead shows "RERA registered" only when the number matches a licence whose validity period ended within the last year, which is the register's freshness. BrickBrief does not issue or confirm licences.

The DLD registers areas in square metres and all calculations use them. When a report is shown in square feet, values are converted at one square metre equals 10.764 square feet and sizes are rounded to the nearest square foot.

A report is not a valuation, an appraisal or investment advice. It is a summary of what the DLD registered. BrickBrief is not affiliated with the Dubai Land Department, RERA or Ejari. Agents add their own letterhead; the numbers underneath are the same for everyone.