How the Ux Dubai Real Estate Index is built

Short version: every registered sale, grouped with its peers, compared with last year, weighted so that the mix of what sold does not move the number.

The problem an index has to solve

Every day a different set of homes changes hands. If one month has more Palm Jumeirah villas than usual, the average price per square metre rises even if not a single home got more expensive. Publishing that average as "the market" is how most Dubai price reports get their headlines. This index is built to separate a real price move from a change in what happened to sell.

Source

Every transaction comes from the Dubai Land Department open data (Dubai Pulse), pulled each night through the official API. Sales only (mortgages and gifts are excluded), residential only, apartments and villas only (land and whole buildings are excluded). Rents come from the Ejari tenancy contract register: new contracts only, single-unit contracts only. Renewals are excluded because they are capped by the RERA rental index and do not reflect what a new tenant pays. The database holds 1,103,005 registered sales and 6,127,274 tenancy contracts.

Strata

Each sale is placed in a stratum: registry area, property type (apartment or villa), regime (ready or off-plan) and one of three size bands, cut at the terciles of registered size so each band holds a third of the market. Within a stratum homes are alike, so the median price per square metre of a stratum moves because prices moved, not because the mix did. Area indices use the same strata without the area dimension.

The daily point

For each day, the index takes the last one, two or three calendar months of registered sales (the window is chosen per series: the shortest that publishes on at least 95% of days with a 99th-percentile daily change under 2%) and computes, stratum by stratum, the ratio between the median price of the window and the median price of the whole previous calendar year. Those ratios are combined with fixed weights equal to each stratum's share of sales in that base year (a Laspeyres index). The result is the level for that day.

Windows are aligned to calendar months rather than a fixed number of days because tenancy contracts cluster on the first of the month; a 30-day window that sometimes holds one first-of-month and sometimes none would jump for no reason.

Chain-linking

Within a year every day is measured against the same base, so there is no daily chaining and no drift from noise accumulating. On 1 January the base year moves forward. The two baskets are valued on the same day (31 December, or the nearest day that publishes) and the new series is scaled to meet the old one, so the change of basket never shows as a step. Levels are expressed with the 2021 average equal to 100.

What is left out

• Registrations with implausible data: sizes under 15 or over 5,000 square metres, apartments over 1,500, prices under 1,000 or over 150,000 AED per square metre; for rents, under 100 or over 20,000 AED per square metre per year. The 1st percentile of registered tenancy sizes is one square metre, so this filter matters.
• The top and bottom 1% of price per square metre within each type and regime, measured on the base year, are trimmed before medians are taken.
• A stratum enters a year's basket only with at least 30 sales in the base year, and counts on a given day only with at least 5 sales in the window.
• A day is published only if the live strata carry at least 60% of the basket's weight. Otherwise it is a gap, shown as a gap.
• Transactions the Land Department later withdraws are removed from the series. The registry does not register late (measured: 3 of 33,000 sales appeared after the fact) but it does cancel or correct about 0.4% of them, so the last three months are reconciled every week.

Townhouses

The registry does not label townhouses: 24,528 villa-type sales are marked "Villa", 10,741 carry no sub-type and 82 say "Stacked Townhouses". The "townhouses and small villas" series is therefore villa-type property under 350 square metres, and "villas" is 350 and above. It is a proxy, and it is named as one.

What it is not

It is not a repeat-sales index (the registry carries no unit identifier, so the same home cannot be followed between sales). It is not a forecast. It is not the official DLD residential price index, which is quarterly and uses a different method; the two agree on direction.

Revisions

The last 120 days of every series are recomputed each night as withdrawn transactions are removed and the current month fills in. Older values are frozen. Sales are registered the day they happen (measured: 3 of 33,000 appeared later), so the sale index barely revises. Tenancy contracts reach the Ejari register days or weeks after their start date, so the last three weeks of every rent series are provisional and move as contracts arrive.

From index to AED per square foot

An index level (2021 average = 100) says nothing to anyone, so the site shows money instead. Each series is anchored once: the median registered price per square foot of the last twelve months, computed with the same filters as the index, is assigned to the index's average level over those same twelve months. Every daily point is then the index times that constant. The curve is identical; only the scale changes. The figure is what a constant basket of homes costs, not the median of whatever sold that day, which moves with the mix.

Current headline: AED 1,708 per sq ft on 4 October 2026 (index 164.2). Data revised nightly at 03:00 Dubai time.