Take a two bedroom in a tower in Dubai Marina. The owner wants to know what it is worth. The agent pulls the comparables.
In the median building, at the median bedroom count, there are four of them in a year.
Not four this month. Four in twelve months.
What the register says
We took every residential resale registered in Dubai over the two years to July 2026, grouped them by building and bedroom count, and counted how many changed hands per year in each group. Off plan is excluded, so this is ready stock only. There is no minimum this time. Every group counts, including the ones with almost nothing in them, because the whole point is how few most sellers have.
That is 6,166 groups.
The median group sees four sales a year. Twenty two percent of groups see exactly one. Thirty seven percent see fewer than three.
Why that matters more than it sounds
A valuation is an argument from evidence. When the evidence is four transactions, two things follow, and neither is comfortable.
The first is that one sale moves the number. If a flat in your line sold well because it had been done properly, that sale is now a quarter of the evidence about what your building is worth. If one sold badly because the owner needed out in a hurry, that is also a quarter. Nobody is averaging away an outlier at that sample size, because there is nothing to average it against.
The second is that the seller who is the good one that year is not competing with the market. They are setting it.
This is why two agents can look at the same building and give a seller numbers that are two hundred thousand dirhams apart, and both be reasoning honestly. They are working from four data points and they have weighted them differently.
What we would do with it
If you are selling, find out how many sales your building actually had at your bedroom count in the last year before you accept anybody's number, including ours. It takes minutes. If the answer is three, treat every valuation you are given as a much softer thing than it appears, and look hard at what those three flats were like inside.
If the answer is thirty, you are in a well traded building and the range is real. Price into it and do not overthink.
If you are an agent, this is the most useful thing you can put in front of a seller who thinks the portal estimate is a fact. The portal is doing the same arithmetic you are, on the same four sales, without having walked any of them.
How we got the numbers
Residential sales only, registration type Existing Properties, so no off plan and no handover resales. Groups are building name and bedroom count as recorded in the register. Counts are per twelve months across a twenty four month window. No minimum group size, unlike our earlier piece on price spread, because here the small groups are the finding rather than noise to be filtered out.
No individual transaction is reproduced here and no personal data is involved. The register carries buildings, sizes, dates and prices. It does not carry names.
Data from the Dubai Land Department transaction register, published as Open Data on Dubai Pulse, snapshot dated 8 July 2026, used under the Dubai Open Data Licence. The information is provided on an as is basis with no warranty as to accuracy. This analysis and every figure in it are our own work. It is not produced, endorsed, verified or in any way associated with the Dubai Land Department, Dubai Pulse or the Government of Dubai.
If you want the count for a specific building, ask us. It takes a few minutes and we will send it whether or not there is anything in it for us.