How We Built Dubuy.ai: Making DLD Data Actually Useful
The story behind Dubuy.ai — why we built it, what problems we're solving, and how we turn raw government data into actionable insights.
Dubai has one of the most transparent property markets in the world. Every transaction is recorded by the Dubai Land Department. The data is publicly available. And yet, most buyers make decisions based on agent opinions and portal listing prices rather than actual transaction data. We built Dubuy.ai to fix that.
The Problem
The DLD publishes transaction data through their Open Data portal. It's comprehensive — every sale, every rent contract, every project registration. But it comes as raw CSV files with thousands of rows, inconsistent area names, and no analysis. To get useful insights, you need to download the data, clean it, match transactions to communities, calculate medians, compute trends, and compare across time periods. Most buyers won't do this. Most agents can't.
What We Do
We take the raw DLD data and transform it into community profiles that answer the questions buyers actually have: What's the median price per square foot? How has it changed year-over-year? What do similar apartments rent for? What are the service charges? How many transactions actually happen (is this a liquid market or will I struggle to sell)? We cover 87 communities with 618,000+ transactions.
Why We Use Medians, Not Averages
Every number on Dubuy.ai is a median, not an average. Here's why: if ten apartments sell in a community — nine at AED 1M and one penthouse at AED 20M — the average is AED 2.9M, which is wildly misleading. The median is AED 1M, which accurately represents what a typical buyer pays. This matters more in Dubai than most markets because the range between entry-level and ultra-luxury is enormous.
Our Data Sources
Everything comes from official sources: DLD for transactions, Ejari for rental contracts, RERA for service charges, KHDA for school ratings, Dubai Statistics Centre for population data, and the UAE Central Bank for mortgage rates. We don't scrape listing portals (which show asking prices, not actual prices) and we don't use agent estimates. The data is what it is.
What's Next
We're building towards real-time transaction tracking, predictive pricing models, and deeper neighbourhood-level analysis. The goal is simple: give every Dubai property buyer the same quality of data that institutional investors have. The DLD data is public — the analysis shouldn't be locked behind expensive subscriptions or agent gatekeepers.
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