Three in Four Dubai Sales Are Now Off-Plan

Dubai has always liked buying the future. But in the second quarter of 2026, the market crossed a line it has never crossed before: 75.9% of all transactions were off-plan — 22,729 off-plan sales against just 7,229 ready ones. That is the highest off-plan share of all 26 quarters since the start of 2020. Three out of every four homes sold in Dubai last quarter did not exist yet.

The trend has been building for a while. Off-plan's share was 58.5% in Q1 2024 and 65.5% in Q2 2025. Each step up felt incremental. The jump to 75.9% does not. Dubai's property market is now, overwhelmingly, a market in promises rather than keys.

The strange part: the off-plan premium is collapsing

Here is where it gets interesting. You might expect record off-plan demand to push off-plan pricing further above ready stock. The opposite has happened. For apartments, the gap between the off-plan median price per square foot and the ready median has been narrowing steadily:

Quarter	Off-plan median PSF	Ready median PSF	Off-plan premium
2023 Q1	AED 1,713	AED 1,127	+51.9%
2024 Q4	—	—	+34.6%
2026 Q1	AED 1,852	AED 1,408	+31.6%
2026 Q2	AED 1,758	AED 1,400	+25.5%

In early 2023, buyers paid roughly half as much again per square foot for an off-plan apartment as for a ready one. By Q2 2026, that premium had compressed to about a quarter.

What actually drove the convergence

Read the table carefully and the story is not that off-plan got cheap. It is that ready caught up. Off-plan apartment pricing has been roughly flat across the period — around AED 1,713 per square foot in early 2023 to AED 1,758 in Q2 2026. Ready apartments, meanwhile, rose about 24% over the same stretch. The secondary market did the work.

That has a direct consequence for the most common sales pitch in Dubai: "buy off-plan for capital growth." The mechanical version of that pitch — buy at an off-plan price, wait for handover, and the unit converges upward toward ready-market pricing — worked beautifully when the gap was 51.9%. With the gap at 25.5%, the runway is structurally shorter. The convergence trade still exists, but half of it has already happened, and it happened for people who bought in 2023, not for people buying now.

What a 76% off-plan market means

A few honest observations rather than a verdict:

• Price discovery is increasingly developer-led. When three-quarters of transactions are primary-market launches, headline "market prices" reflect what developers choose to release, at what spec, in which districts — not just what resale buyers will pay.
• Ready stock is scarcer than it looks. Just 7,229 ready sales in a quarter, in a city this size, tells you how much of the tradable market has shifted to the launch pipeline. Buyers who need keys now are competing in a thin pool — which is consistent with ready prices having done the climbing.
• The payment-plan effect cuts both ways. Off-plan's appeal is partly financial engineering: staged payments make big tickets feel small. That is genuine utility, but it is not capital growth, and it should not be priced as if it were.

None of this makes off-plan a bad buy. Location, developer track record and the specific payment plan still decide individual outcomes, and communities such as Dubai World Central show off-plan demand concentrating where infrastructure is genuinely arriving. But the 2023-vintage argument — that off-plan is systematically underpriced against ready — is measurably weaker than it was. The data says the discount has narrowed by half.

How to use this

If you are weighing an off-plan purchase, price it against ready comparables in the same district and ask what you are paying the remaining ~25% premium for: newer product, a payment plan, and delivery risk. Sometimes that trade is worth it. Sometimes a ready unit at AED 1,400 per square foot, renting from day one, is the better answer. Run both through the screener and let the numbers argue it out.

Methodology: figures computed from DLD-registered residential sales through 7 July 2026; recent weeks under-report due to registration lag (typically 4–8 weeks). Premium figures compare apartment median prices per square foot, off-plan versus ready, in the quarter shown.