Twelve Sales in Two Years: The High Value Leasehold Resale Market in Dubai

Above AED 5,000,000, the Dubai Land Department registered twelve leasehold unit sales in the last 24 months. Freehold registered 10,769 over the same period.

Twelve. For the entire emirate, across two full years. Roughly one every two months.

If you own a high value leasehold property in Dubai, that count matters more than any valuation anyone has quoted you.

There is plenty written about converting leasehold to freehold. This is about what those guides never answer: what happens when you try to sell.

Most owners frame this as a value question. Am I holding an asset worth less than the freehold unit down the road, and am I losing money by doing nothing.

Fair question. It is not the urgent one.

The urgent question is whether you can sell at all, inside a window you choose, at a price you can predict before you list. Twelve registered sales in 24 months says that market barely exists at your price point. When you decide to exit, you are not entering a market. You are trying to build one from scratch, around one property, for one buyer.

That is the fear worth naming, and almost nobody names it before they take the listing.

Valuation is comparison. The valuer, the buyer's broker and the buyer all reach for the same evidence: recent, similar, registered sales nearby.

Above AED 5,000,000 on leasehold title, that evidence set is twelve transactions across the whole of Dubai and two years. Filter for your community, your building type and your size band, and you are often left with nothing usable at all.

Three consequences follow, and none are theoretical.

Price discovery breaks. Two competent valuers can hand you numbers far apart, because both are extrapolating rather than comparing. You cannot establish what your property is worth from public evidence. Neither can your buyer.

Time on market stretches. Thin does not mean dead. The buyer pool is small, specific and slow to assemble, and finding the one buyer who will take this title is a different exercise from selling into a segment with thousands of registered sales behind it.

Your negotiating position weakens. In a market with a visible clearing price, a low offer is refutable. You point at the registrations. With twelve city-wide sales, a buyer can argue almost any number and you have very little to answer with. Whatever offer is on the table becomes the market, because nothing else is.

Now the part that looks like good news and is not.

| Sales at AED 5,000,000 and above, last 24 months | Registered sales | Median price |

| Freehold | 10,769 | AED 7,378,000 |

| Tenure not recorded | 1,477 | AED 7,480,000 |

| Leasehold | 12 | AED 16,100,000 |

The leasehold median above AED 5,000,000 is AED 16,100,000. The freehold median is AED 7,378,000. Read quickly, that says high value leasehold trades at more than double freehold.

Do not take it to the bank.

A median built from twelve observations is not a market rate. It describes twelve specific assets. Move a few of them and the median moves with them. The freehold figure rests on 10,769 registrations, so it is stable and it says something about a market. The leasehold figure rests on a set of sales you could list on half a page.

What AED 16,100,000 most likely reflects is selection, not strength. The high value leasehold sales that do complete tend to be unusual: a particular villa, a particular plot, a buyer with a specific reason to accept the title. That is not evidence your unit will find a premium buyer. It is evidence that the few which traded were not ordinary.

Scarcity of transactions is not scarcity value. They are close to opposites.

Across all registered unit sales in the last 24 months between AED 300,000 and AED 50,000,000, freehold recorded 232,367 transactions against 4,228 leasehold. That is about 55 times the volume. Median freehold price was AED 1,321,106 against AED 686,980 leasehold. Per square metre, AED 18,231 against AED 9,154, roughly double.

Lower down, leasehold does trade. If your property sits near that AED 686,980 median, you have a functioning market and little of this applies to you. Above AED 5,000,000, all of it does.

Every freehold to leasehold comparison in this post is a raw comparison between two different populations of property. They are not the same buildings in the same places, and they differ in ways these figures do not control for, such as location, age and building type. The gap describes what the two sets of stock are and where they stand. It is not a multiplier that conversion applies to your specific property.

So nobody, us included, can tell you that converting doubles your value, or adds a percentage, or produces a specific gain in dirhams. Any figure of that kind is manufactured. If a broker hands you one, ask which registered transactions produced it, because this data cannot.

What the numbers do support is narrower and more useful to you. The freehold market is far deeper, it prices at a far higher rate per square metre, and above AED 5,000,000 the leasehold resale market is close to non existent. Liquidity is the honest argument. Value uplift is not.

The rental market shows no equivalent problem.

Over the last 18 months, Ejari registered 74,430 leasehold unit contracts against 101,180 freehold. Median leasehold rent was AED 57,750, median freehold AED 69,695, about 21 percent higher, and again across different stock in different places.

The volume gap on rent is nothing like the volume gap on sales. Tenants do not appear to be filtering on your title. Buyers above AED 5,000,000 clearly are.

Your asset is liquid as an income stream and illiquid as a sale. That gives you a real option. Holding and letting is not a defeat, and it keeps you out of a forced sale into a market this thin.

Some owners should leave it alone, and nobody says so often enough.

If you have no plans to sell and the property lets well, a thin resale market costs you nothing you will ever feel. Whatever conversion involves in your case, you would be spending it now against a benefit you may never use. Eligibility is also not universal, and if your property does not qualify, budget does not change the answer.

It matters when you intend to sell inside a window you have already defined, or when the property is a meaningful share of your net worth and you need an exit that does not depend on one unusual buyer arriving.

Be honest about which of those you are. The answer changes the decision completely.

Whether conversion is open to you, and what it would involve, depends on your individual property, so it has to be checked against that specific property rather than assumed from the building or the neighbourhood.

Send us the title deed and the property details and we will look at your specific case: what the title actually is, whether conversion is a realistic option for it, and what registered comparable evidence exists in your segment. If conversion is not available, or not worth doing for you, we will say so.

Oliva is a Dubai brokerage with no paid placements.

Data note. The market-wide sales figures are registered DLD transactions for units over the last 24 months, AED 300,000 to AED 50,000,000, floor area above 20 sqm. The AED 5,000,000 and above figures are a separate cut: registered DLD transactions for units over the last 24 months at AED 5,000,000 and above, with no upper bound and no floor area filter. Rental figures are registered Ejari contracts for units over the last 18 months, AED 15,000 to AED 2,000,000 annual. Tenure reflects the DLD freehold flag as recorded, including transactions where it is absent. Freehold and leasehold figures describe two different populations of property, not the same property before and after a change of tenure.

Oliva Research, Market Intelligence Team. RERA BRN 1573501, DLD Broker Card 92025. Analysis is built from Dubai Land Department transaction records and Ejari contract registrations. Nothing here is personal investment advice.