In Business Bay, a ready apartment sold last year at a median of 1,793 dirhams a foot. An off plan apartment in Business Bay went at 2,638. Forty seven percent more, for a building nobody has lived in.
In one Dubailand area, off plan sold for five percent less than ready stock.
Both of those are in the same register, over the same two years.
What the register says
We took every residential sale registered in Dubai over the two years to July 2026 and compared the median price per square foot of off plan against ready stock inside each registered area. Only areas with at least a hundred sales on both sides are included. That leaves 45 areas.
Off plan sells higher in 43 of them. The size of the gap is where it gets interesting.
At the top, Dubai Investment Park Second at 120 percent, Palm Jumeirah at 109, Motor City at 107, Dubai Marina at 80. In the middle, Dubai South at 51 and Business Bay at 47. At the bottom, Dubai Hills Estate at 9, The Valley at 2, Mudon at minus 1.
What is actually inside that gap
We are not going to tell you this is all about how the flats look. It is not, and we would rather say so than let you find out from someone in the comments.
A developer sells on a payment plan, and paying over three years is worth real money to a buyer. Developers waive fees and fold in furniture. New towers go up on the newest plots, which are not always the same streets as the older stock. And in some of these areas the off plan product is a different thing entirely. On the Palm, new launches are a class of property that barely existed when the older stock was built. A 109 percent gap there is not telling you that ready villas need a refresh.
Age, finance, product and finish are tangled together in these numbers and this file cannot pull them apart.
What the range does tell you is that the premium is not a fact about Dubai. It is a fact about a specific area in a specific year, and it moves by a factor of twenty across the city.
What a seller can do about it
Nothing about the payment plan, and nothing about the year the building went up.
What is worth knowing is which kind of area you are selling in. If off plan near you carries a small premium, ready stock is holding its own, and the argument for spending before listing is about beating your neighbours rather than the developer. If the premium is enormous, understand what is driving it before you assume a renovation closes it, because on the Palm it will not.
The comparison a buyer actually makes is mostly made in the first two minutes. A show apartment is finished, styled, lit and empty of anyone else's life. A resale is very often none of those things. Closing that particular gap is the only part of any of this that a seller controls.
How we got the numbers
Residential sales only. Registration type Off Plan Properties against Existing Properties, compared inside the same registered area. Price per square foot derived from the registered price per square metre, converted at 10.7639. Areas need at least one hundred sales on each side to appear, which gives 45. Medians rather than averages, so one very large transaction cannot move the number.
Registered areas are not the same as the communities people name. Several of the areas in this file contain more than one community, so we have used the register's own boundaries and named only those we could confirm hold a single community. Treat an area figure as an area figure, not as a statement about a particular development.
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 area, ask us. It takes a few minutes and we will send it whether or not there is anything in it for us.