Is My Dubai Property Eligible for Freehold Conversion?

No article can tell you whether your leasehold property is eligible for freehold conversion. This one included.

The answer depends on the specific property, and on the land that property stands on. Two buildings on the same road can get different answers.

That is an unsatisfying sentence to read when you have real money sitting in a leasehold title. It is still the true one.

So this post does three things instead. It shows what the transaction record says about why the question is worth asking. It explains what the answer actually attaches to. And it lists the documents to have in front of you before you put the question to anyone, including us.

Over the last 24 months the Dubai Land Department registered 232,367 freehold unit sales between AED 300,000 and AED 50,000,000. Over the same window it registered 4,228 leasehold ones. Freehold volume is about 55 times leasehold volume.

| Registered DLD sales, units, last 24 months | Leasehold | Freehold |

| Transactions, AED 300,000 to AED 50,000,000 | 4,228 | 232,367 |

| Median price | AED 686,980 | AED 1,321,106 |

| Median price per sqm | AED 9,154 | AED 18,231 |

| Sales at AED 5,000,000 and above | 12 | 10,769 |

The per square metre figures are the ones people quote: AED 18,231 against AED 9,154, roughly double.

Read those two columns as a description of two different populations of property, not as a price tag attached to a piece of paper. They set freehold stock as a group against leasehold stock as a group. They do not follow one unit through a change of tenure, so nothing in them is an uplift figure for your property.

Dubai freehold stock and Dubai leasehold stock are not the same buildings in the same places. They sit in different communities and hold a different mix of building types. The per square metre gap reflects what the stock is and where it stands. It is not a multiplier that gets applied to your unit on the day its tenure changes.

Nobody can tell you that conversion doubles your value, or adds a percentage to your price, or hands you a specific number of dirhams. We cannot tell you that either. Anyone who does is guessing, and you are the one who carries the loss if the guess is wrong.

What the data does support is narrower and more useful.

The freehold market is far deeper. When you decide to sell a freehold unit you are selling into a market that absorbed 232,367 transactions in 24 months. A leasehold unit sells into one that absorbed 4,228.

At the top of the market that stops being a difference of degree. Across those 24 months the register holds 12 leasehold sales at AED 5,000,000 or above. That is roughly one every two months, across the entire emirate. Freehold recorded 10,769 in the same window.

The median on those 12 leasehold sales is AED 16,100,000, above the freehold high ticket median of AED 7,378,000. Read nothing into that. Twelve sales is not a market. It is a short list of unusual assets, and a median drawn from twelve numbers moves the moment one of them moves.

If you own a high value leasehold property, that row is the honest argument for looking into conversion. Not price. Exit.

One more figure, because it bears on how much confidence anyone should carry into this question.

Alongside those two groups, 52,619 registered sales in the same 24 months carry no tenure flag at all. Median price AED 1,100,000, median AED 17,644 per sqm.

That is a large block of the transaction record where the tenure field is simply not populated. If someone tells you they ran your building through a dataset and confirmed its status, ask which field they read.

Eligibility is not a general rule you can look up and apply to yourself, and it does not attach to you. It attaches to the specific property, and to the land that property stands on.

That is why two owners can ask the identical question about two buildings on the same street and come away with two different answers. It is also why an answer someone else was given is not evidence of the answer for your unit, and why an answer given at one point in time is not proof of the answer now.

The only way to get a real answer is to have your own property looked at specifically, by the parties who can speak to that property. Get it checked before you plan around it.

We are not going to publish a criteria checklist. The checklists in circulation carry fee percentages, week counts and step numbers we cannot trace to a published DLD, RERA or Mollak source. On a multi million dirham asset, a confident wrong answer costs more than no answer.

Whoever you take this to, the first thing they need is the paperwork that identifies your property. Put these in one folder:

• The title document as registered.
• Any lease, grant or other underlying document you hold for the property, in full rather than in summary.
• The plot identifiers: plot number, community, building name, Makani number, unit number.
• Any correspondence you have received about the status of the land or the building.
• Your current service charge position, including the Mollak statement.
• Anything registered against the title, such as a mortgage or other restriction.
• Your Ejari contracts if the unit is tenanted, since a running tenancy shapes both timing and price.

With that folder, the conversation becomes specific. Without it, the honest answer from anyone competent is that they cannot tell yet.

Assume the answer for your property comes back yes. That still does not settle it.

Whether that costs you anything, and how much, is something to establish for your own property rather than read off a table someone published. So the question becomes what you would be buying.

If you plan to hold and let, the rent evidence is not dramatic. Median registered Ejari rent over the last 18 months runs AED 69,695 on freehold units against AED 57,750 on leasehold, about 21% higher. That is the same population comparison as the sales figures, different stock in different locations, and not a change you can bank on by changing a title.

If you intend to sell inside a defined window, the liquidity case is the strong one, and the arithmetic deserves proper work before you commit to anything.

If you intend to hold for a long time and the yield is doing its job, whatever you spend may buy you very little you would ever notice.

We would rather say that before you spend the money than after.

Send us the plot number and the title document for the specific unit. We will tell you what the register holds on it, what we can establish about the land it sits on, and where the question has to go next.

If what we find is that this is not available for your property, you will get that in the same reply.

Oliva is a Dubai brokerage with no paid placements. No developer or landowner pays us to route your question anywhere.

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Oliva Research, Market Intelligence Team. RERA BRN 1573501. DLD Broker Card 92025. Sales figures in this post are registered DLD transactions for units over 20 sqm in the last 24 months. Rent figures are registered Ejari contracts for units over the last 18 months.