A one bedroom in Sulafa Tower sold for 988 dirhams a foot last year. Another one bedroom in Sulafa Tower sold for 1,451.
Same tower. Same bedroom count. Fifty one sales in between. On the median 917 square feet those units carry, that is a gap of 425,000 dirhams.
We went looking for this number because we kept having the same conversation with agents. A seller asks whether it is worth putting money into the flat before listing. The agent has an instinct, usually a good one, and nothing to point at. So the seller does nothing, lists at the number the portal suggests, and sits.
The Land Department publishes every registered sale. We pulled the file and looked at what actually happens inside a single building.
What the register says
We took every residential resale registered in Dubai over the two years to July 2026. Off plan is excluded, so this is ready stock only, 41,583 apartment sales. Then we grouped them by building and by bedroom count and kept only the groups with at least twenty five sales, so nothing rests on one odd transaction. That leaves 262 groups.
In the median group, the top tenth of sales went for 29 percent more per square foot than the bottom tenth. Three quarters of the groups are at 20 percent or wider. Nearly a third are above 40 percent.
Some of the towers will be familiar. In Grande, two bedroom units went between 2,882 and 5,366 dirhams a foot across seventy one sales. Elite Residence one bedrooms, 1,238 to 1,811. Aykon City Tower C two bedrooms, 1,722 to 2,363. Torch Tower two bedrooms, 1,265 to 1,629. Marina Pinnacle one bedrooms, 1,112 to 1,432.
What the gap is made of
Floor. View. Which way the unit faces. Layout, because two flats with the same bedroom count are not always the same flat. And condition.
We are not going to tell you condition is all of it. It is not, and any agent who has walked forty units in one tower knows that. A high floor with a marina view will beat a low floor with a car park view whatever either of them looks like inside.
What we will say is that floor and aspect were fixed on the day the building went up. Condition is the only term in that list anyone can still move.
What it means on a listing appointment
When a seller asks whether the work is worth doing, the honest answer is that it depends where they currently sit in their building's band. That is a question with a real answer, and it takes about ten minutes to find.
If the flat is original, unfurnished, dated kitchen, dated bathrooms, it is sitting near the bottom of the band. In Sulafa Tower that is 905,000 dirhams. The top is 1,330,000. Nobody captures all of that with a renovation, because part of it is the floor and the view. But the seller is competing inside a 425,000 dirham range.
If the flat has already been done well, the seller is near the top and the right advice is to list it and stop spending.
That is the conversation we would rather agents were able to have. Not a pitch. An arithmetic check that either says do the work or says do not bother.
How we got the numbers
Residential sales only, registration type Existing Properties, so no off plan and no handover resales. Price per square foot is derived from the registered price per square metre, converted at 10.7639. Groups need twenty five or more sales to appear. Deciles rather than minimum and maximum, so a single outlier at either end cannot move the number.
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 figure 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.