Dubai's residential market, 2025, in numbers

Dubai closed 2025 with its largest year of real-estate activity on record. The Dubai Land Department reported more than 270,000 transactions across all asset classes, worth AED 917 billion, a rise of about a fifth on 2024. The 2024 base was itself a record: 226,000 transactions and AED 761 billion, up 36 per cent by volume and 20 per cent by value on the year before.

Within that total, Knight Frank counted 205,400 residential transactions in 2025, up 18 per cent, with a combined value of AED 544.2 billion, up 25 per cent. The firm's residential basket for 2024 had already shown an average of AED 1,685 per square foot, up 19.1 per cent, with villas at AED 2,009 per square foot and prime values up 16.9 per cent.

At the top of the market, Knight Frank recorded 500 sales above ten million US dollars in 2025, worth 9.05 billion dollars, against 435 such sales in 2024. Savills counted more than 6,700 transactions above AED 10 million in the year and placed Dubai among five cities worldwide whose prime capital values grew by more than 6 per cent, after growth of 6.8 per cent in 2024. ValuStrat's December 2025 index put villa values up 25.1 per cent year on year and residential values overall up 19.8 per cent.

Two features of the year deserve a second look. The first is the weight of off-plan sales: Savills attributes 72 per cent of 2025 activity to developer launches rather than completed homes. That share tells investors where liquidity sits today, and it also means a large part of the market's recorded value is a promise of future delivery rather than a standing asset.

The second is the way prime prices are quoted. Knight Frank's figure of AED 6,627 per square foot for the fourth quarter of 2024 came from a four-community basket; its 2025 prime values of AED 3,850 to 4,300 per square foot come from a ten-community basket. The two are not a time series, and a reader who sets them side by side will see a fall that did not happen. The firm's own forecast for 2026 is modest: prime values up around 3 per cent, the mainstream market up around 1 per cent.

For a buyer, the practical reading is simple. The volume figures describe a deep and liquid market; the prime figures describe a narrow one, where the community, the plot and the developer matter more than the headline average. The sources behind every number in this note are listed in the group's research record, and each should be checked against the developer's own documents before a decision is made.