PropertyIQ — Dubai Market Report (2026-03)

Bottom Line

Volume Fell a Third but Prices Held — March Was a Pause, Not a Pivot

Dubai recorded 8,946 transactions in March 2026, a 33.6% drop from February and 27.9% below March 2025, marking the sharpest monthly contraction in recent memory. Yet the headline volume decline overstates the underlying stress. Median prices per sqm eased just 1.9% month-on-month to AED 18,504, still 5% above year-ago levels — a spread that signals durable demand support rather than distressed selling. The market is cooling in velocity, not in value, and the distinction matters for capital allocation. Rents told a different story. Median rents per sqm dropped 12% month-on-month and sit 3.6% below March 2025, compressing gross yields meaningfully from the prior month. That rent softness, concentrated in corridors where off-plan delivery is accelerating, suggests the supply pipeline is beginning to temper landlord pricing power even as sales prices hold firm. Investors underwriting acquisitions at trailing rental assumptions should stress-test for continued rental compression through the second half of 2026. Activity remained concentrated in familiar corridors. Jumeirah Village Circle led with 2,754 transactions at AED 15,893 per sqm and a 7.2% gross yield — the market's clearest income proposition. Business Bay posted 1,877 transactions at AED 27,386 per sqm with a 5.8% yield, occupying the mid-premium tier where capital appreciation bets are priced more aggressively. Majan recorded 1,605 transactions, while Palm Deira and Dubai South also featured among the month's most active communities, reinforcing that emerging master-planned districts are absorbing a growing share of buyer appetite. The actionable read: March's volume drop is consistent with a seasonal or calendar-driven pullback rather than a demand inflection. Price resilience at 5% year-on-year growth, against a backdrop of materially lower transaction counts, implies that sellers are not capitulating and buyers are not retreating — they are simply transacting less frequently at similar price levels. If April transactions recover to within 10–15% of April 2025 levels, March will look like a one-month air pocket. That single data print is the watch-item that confirms or challenges this thesis. Income-focused buyers should lean into Jumeirah Village Circle's yield premium now, while appreciation-oriented capital has a narrowing window in Business Bay before rental compression erodes total-return projections.

By the Numbers

Six Numbers That Define a Market in Transition

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52% of March deals concentrated in just five areas — selectivity at cycle highs
Jumeirah Village Circle, Business Bay, Majan, Palm Deira, and Dubai South collectively dominated transaction flow, indicating capital is clustering around proven liquidity corridors rather than dispersing broadly.
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AED 27,386 per sqm in Business Bay — premium pricing holds despite volume softness
Business Bay's median price per sqm remained the highest among top-five areas by volume, demonstrating that core urban demand is price-resilient even as aggregate transaction counts fell.
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Gross yield at 7.2% in Jumeirah Village Circle — highest among major corridors but compressing
JVC's yield advantage over Business Bay exceeds 140 basis points, yet year-on-year compression signals that rental growth is no longer keeping pace with price appreciation.
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1,525 transactions in Dubai South at AED 16,410 per sqm — emerging corridor proves durable
Dubai South's volume held above 1,500 deals in a month when the broader market contracted sharply, confirming sustained off-plan demand in affordable, infrastructure-linked locations.
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AED 30,103 per sqm median in Palm Deira — premium positioning for a nascent community
Palm Deira's elevated pricing alongside 1,572 transactions suggests buyers are pricing in long-term master-plan value rather than current-income fundamentals, a classic forward-looking bet.
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AED 1,000 per sqm median rent in Majan versus AED 1,595 in Business Bay — 60% rental gap
The wide rental spread between emerging and established corridors highlights where yield compression has room to narrow and where rent-growth upside is greatest for new-build investors.

Price Dynamics

Prices Hold Within 2% of Highs Despite Volume Shock

Dubai's pricing regime is displaying a characteristic that separates this cycle from previous ones: prices are barely flinching even as transaction volumes contract sharply. The median price per square metre edged down less than 2% from February, a move well within seasonal noise given that March straddled the early Ramadan registration slowdown that typically depresses deal flow by 20 to 35 percent. Year-on-year, pricing still sits roughly 5% above March 2025 levels, confirming that the structural appreciation trend that began in late 2022 remains intact even if its slope has flattened. The three-year quarterly price trajectory in the accompanying chart makes this point more convincingly than any single monthly print. From early 2023 through mid-2025, median prices per square metre climbed in a stair-step pattern, with each quarter's trough higher than the prior quarter's peak. That upward channel has not broken. What has changed is the gradient: quarterly gains that once exceeded 3 to 4 percent have compressed into the low single digits, signalling a transition from demand-driven appreciation into a consolidation phase where further upside requires income growth or supply constraints rather than pure momentum. The volume-price diagnostic is instructive here. When volume falls and prices hold, the market is in a liquidity-thinning regime — sellers refuse to discount, buyers pull back, and the surface calm masks fragility. If holding costs (service charges, mortgage rates, opportunity cost of capital) pressure owners over the next two quarters, selective repricing becomes likely in corridors where rental yields have already compressed. The risk is most acute in areas where the gap between asking and transacted prices has widened, a pattern worth monitoring at the individual-community level in coming months. Notably, this resilience is not uniform across the price spectrum. Premium urban locations are holding per-square-metre values well above the marketwide benchmark, while emerging development zones are trading at meaningful discounts that attract a different buyer profile — one focused on yield and capital growth potential rather than lifestyle premiums. This bifurcation suggests the market is not uniformly consolidating but rather splitting into a mature core where appreciation has largely run its course and a growth periphery where price discovery is still active. Investors positioned for appreciation should tighten holding-period assumptions from the two-digit annual gains of 2023–2024 to a 4 to 6 percent annual range unless population inflows reaccelerate. Income-focused buyers benefit from the current environment: flat prices and softening rents mean entry points are improving relative to yield. The falsifiable test is straightforward — if median price per square metre breaches below the trailing six-month average by more than 3% in any single month outside a Ramadan or summer window, the consolidation thesis gives way to an active correction thesis, and defensive positioning becomes warranted.

Volume Analysis

Volume Contracts Sharply, but Ramadan Timing Clouds the Signal

March's transaction count marks the lowest monthly print since mid-2024, a drop steep enough to demand explanation before interpretation. Ramadan began in late February this year, and its first three weeks — the period when registration activity historically contracts 20 to 35 percent — fell squarely within March. That calendar overlap accounts for a substantial share of the month-on-month decline, making raw comparisons to February misleading. The year-on-year shortfall is harder to dismiss on seasonal grounds alone, since Ramadan also straddled March in 2025, yet the gap remains material. This suggests that seasonal drag amplified an underlying deceleration rather than creating one from nothing. The composition of activity tells a sharper story than the headline figure. Concentration tightened meaningfully: the five busiest corridors captured more than half of all registrations, a pattern consistent with buyers retreating to perceived safety. Jumeirah Village Circle maintained its throughput lead by a wide margin, while Business Bay held as the primary premium destination. More notable is the resilience of earlier-stage developments — Dubai South and Palm Deira both sustained volumes above 1,500 transactions, indicating that off-plan appetite did not evaporate even as overall liquidity thinned. Majan similarly posted robust activity, reinforcing its emergence as a mid-market alternative drawing capital away from more established but pricier communities. The volume-price relationship is the critical diagnostic. Prices barely moved on a monthly basis while volume fell sharply — a textbook liquidity-thinning pattern. Sellers are holding asking prices; buyers are stepping back rather than bidding lower. This regime looks calm on the surface but carries latent risk: if holding costs or sentiment shifts eventually force seller concessions, the price adjustment can arrive abruptly. The year-on-year pricing cushion still in place provides a buffer, but it is narrower than at any point in the past twelve months. The accompanying chart illustrates the twelve-month volume rhythm clearly — the summer trough of mid-2025, the Q4 spike driven by visa-cycle renewals and Cityscape momentum, and the sharp March pullback. Visually, March sits below the trailing twelve-month average, but not below the lows recorded during peak summer. That positioning matters: it places the current reading in seasonal-dip territory rather than structural-break territory, at least for now. Investors should treat March as an inconclusive data point rather than a verdict. The actionable watch-item is April's registration count: a recovery toward the trailing three-month average would confirm Ramadan distortion as the primary driver, while a second consecutive sub-9,000 print would signal genuine demand withdrawal requiring a reassessment of near-term entry timing, particularly in corridors outside the top five where liquidity could thin further.

Supply Pipeline

Pipeline Concentration in Emerging Corridors Creates Localised Pressure

Dubai's off-plan appetite remains the clearest forward signal in a month where secondary-market registrations softened, and the geographic skew of that appetite tells a pointed story about where pricing pressure will materialise over the next 18 to 36 months. The pipeline is overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of emerging corridors. Dubai South and Palm Deira — both earlier-stage master-planned communities — sustained robust deal flow even during a seasonally compressed registration window. That demand is largely off-plan by nature: buyers in these corridors are purchasing units scheduled for delivery in 2028 or 2029, meaning the pipeline is back-loaded rather than front-loaded. A back-loaded delivery schedule gives the current absorption cycle room to digest inventory before handovers begin in earnest, but it also means developers are selling against future demand projections that assume population and employment growth continue at their recent clip. If those assumptions weaken, these corridors will be the first to feel the drag because they lack the established rental demand base that insulates more mature communities. Jumeirah Village Circle sits in a different position. Its cumulative transaction depth is unmatched across the market, and new project launches continue to target the area precisely because of that liquidity track record. The risk here is subtler: JVC's absorption engine has historically been powered by yield-seeking investors attracted to relatively accessible price points and strong rental demand. With gross yields compressing across the market — a dynamic already evident in the rental data — developers launching new JVC inventory in 2026 are competing for a buyer pool whose return calculus is shifting. If rental growth does not reaccelerate by the time 2027–2028 deliveries arrive, JVC could face a localised oversupply pocket despite its deep transaction history. Dubai Land Department's launch of Phase II of the Real Estate Tokenisation initiative2 and a partnership with Crypto.com to develop blockchain-enabled property payments11 are infrastructure plays designed to widen the buyer funnel for off-plan product, particularly among international purchasers who find conventional transfer processes friction-heavy. These are medium-term demand enablers rather than immediate volume drivers, but they signal that the regulatory apparatus is actively building rails to absorb the incoming pipeline. The supply-side trend chart illustrates that registration volumes for off-plan-heavy corridors have not collapsed — they have compressed in line with the broader seasonal pattern while maintaining a share of total activity that exceeds their share of completed stock. That gap between transaction share and built-inventory share is the market pricing in future delivery, and it remains wide. The falsifiable watch-item for pipeline risk: if off-plan transaction share in Dubai South or Palm Deira falls below half its March level in any single month through Q3 2026 without a corresponding Ramadan or summer seasonal explanation, the forward demand assumption underpinning current launch pricing in those corridors will need revision downward. Until that trigger fires, the pipeline remains a back-loaded bet on continued population inflows — a bet the market is still willing to make, but one that warrants monitoring with each monthly print.

Area Performance

Five Areas Capture Half of All Deals, but Tier-2 Movers Tell the Real Story

Concentration intensified in March as the top five communities absorbed more than half of all registered transactions, yet the most investable signals emerged from the middle of the leaderboard rather than the familiar leaders at the top. Jumeirah Village Circle maintained its position as the market's highest-volume corridor, with transaction counts well above the nearest competitor. Its gross yield north of 7% continues to distinguish it as the clearest pure-income play in the market, though investors should note that yield leadership partly reflects pricing that sits roughly 14% below the marketwide median per square metre — a discount that keeps entry costs low but also caps near-term capital appreciation potential. Business Bay held its second-place ranking with pricing that runs at approximately 1.7 times JVC's level per square metre and a yield roughly 140 bp lower, positioning it as a capital-growth vehicle rather than an income generator. Neither area's structural role is shifting, and the horizontal bar chart makes the volume gap between the two immediately visible. The more compelling story sits in positions three through five. Majan posted over 1,600 transactions but experienced a steep monthly price decline of roughly 13%, far exceeding the marketwide pricing dip and suggesting that developers or early investors in the area are repricing aggressively to sustain absorption velocity. That combination — high liquidity paired with falling per-square-metre pricing — warrants close monitoring: if April's Majan prices stabilise, the March print may represent an entry window; if they slide further, it signals genuine demand softness rather than tactical repricing. Palm Deira, still an early-stage masterplan, generated over 1,500 transactions at a median above AED 30,000 per square metre, the highest unit pricing among the top five. That premium reflects waterfront positioning and long-dated delivery schedules, meaning buyers are underwriting a vision rather than current cash flow — no yield data is available, reinforcing the speculative character of this corridor. Dubai South rounded out the top five with comparable volume to Palm Deira and pricing near AED 16,400 per square metre, a level competitive with Majan but without the same monthly price erosion, making it the more stable of the two emerging-area plays. The actionable divergence is clear: income-seekers with immediate cash-flow requirements belong in JVC, where yield cushions any near-term price softness. Investors hunting for mispriced entry points should track Majan's April price print — a stabilisation near AED 16,000 per square metre after March's sharp correction would confirm a buying opportunity, while a further decline of 5% or more would signal structural oversupply risk that no yield can compensate for.

Yields

Yield Compression Reveals a Two-Track Market for Income and Growth

Gross yields compressed roughly 67 bp month-on-month to approximately 5.8% at the marketwide level, driven primarily by rents falling faster than prices. That mechanical relationship — rents down sharply while prices held comparatively firm — created a month where income investors saw their forward returns erode even as capital values barely moved. The scatter chart mapping yield against price per sqm across Dubai's major corridors makes the inverse relationship visible: as entry price rises, yield systematically declines, but the areas that break from that regression line are where the actionable insight lives. Jumeirah Village Circle sits well above the trend line, delivering yield meaningfully in excess of what its price level alone would predict. For a pure-income allocation, that positioning is distinctive — lower entry cost paired with rental demand dense enough to sustain outsized cash-on-cash returns relative to peer corridors at similar price points. The risk is that the yield lead reflects a ceiling on capital appreciation rather than a rental premium, but as long as occupancy holds and rental demand remains broad-based in affordable segments, the income case is intact. Business Bay occupies the opposite end of the spectrum, sitting below the yield-price trend line at a level where investors are implicitly accepting thinner current income as a wager on continued price appreciation. That bet makes sense only if the capital growth trajectory remains durable enough to compensate for the yield give-up versus affordable alternatives. With the year-on-year pricing trend still positive but decelerating, the implied appreciation required to justify sub-6% yields in Business Bay is narrowing — a dynamic worth monitoring into Q2. Majan and Dubai South cluster in an intermediate zone where both yield and price per sqm remain competitive. Neither sits dramatically above or below the regression line, which makes them balanced positions rather than pure plays on either income or growth. Majan's recent pricing volatility, however, introduces a timing dimension: if its price stabilises at current levels while rents hold, the yield recalibrates higher and pushes it above the trend line into relative-value territory. Income-seeking investors should anchor allocations in Jumeirah Village Circle, where the yield-to-price ratio remains the market's most favourable. Capital appreciation strategies are better served in Business Bay or Palm Deira, where pricing reflects embedded growth expectations. The most interesting risk-adjusted position may sit in Majan — if its April price print confirms a floor near current levels, the corridor transitions from a volatile emerging name to a dual-return candidate with both yield and re-rating potential. The falsifiable test: if marketwide gross yields compress another 30 bp or more in April without a corresponding rent recovery, the income thesis across all corridors weakens materially and rebalancing toward appreciation-only plays becomes the rational pivot.

Rental Market

Rents Fell Faster Than Prices, Signalling a Supply-Led Correction

The rental market repriced more aggressively than the sales market in March, and the divergence matters: when rents decline faster than capital values, it signals that landlords — not buyers — are absorbing the brunt of softening demand. That pattern is now visible across Dubai's major corridors and points to rental supply pressure from recent completions rather than a broad tenant exodus. The horizontal bar chart reveals a rental gradient that is compressing from the top. Business Bay commands the highest rents among high-volume corridors, but the gap between its rate and mid-tier areas has narrowed as premium rents flatten while affordable corridors hold relatively steady. Jumeirah Village Circle's rental rate sits roughly 28% below Business Bay's on a per-sqm basis, yet it sustains the market's highest transaction throughput — tenants are actively choosing value over location, and landlords in premium areas are finding it harder to push asking rents higher. Majan's rental level falls meaningfully below both, sitting at a discount that reflects its earlier-stage infrastructure but also exposes a vulnerability: rents there have not kept pace with what its capital values would imply, suggesting new completions are adding rental inventory faster than tenant demand can absorb it. This supply dynamic is the key structural driver. Developers who have not yet sold inventory in recently completed towers are placing units on the rental market, creating localised oversupply even as sales-market sentiment remains constructive. The effect is most pronounced in emerging corridors where delivery schedules are densest — precisely the areas that attracted strong off-plan capital over the past two years. For landlords in these pockets, the implication is clear: rental pricing power will remain constrained until absorption catches up with deliveries, likely a two-to-three quarter lag from handover. The distinction between new-contract and renewal rates amplifies this picture. RERA's rental index caps increases for existing tenants at formula-driven thresholds, so headline declines primarily reflect what new tenants are signing. When new-contract rates soften while renewal rates remain capped, effective market rents are falling even faster than the headline figures suggest — a dynamic that particularly pressures landlords relying on tenant turnover to mark rents to market. Investors seeking rental income should focus on corridors where tenant demand is structural rather than speculative. Jumeirah Village Circle's rental resilience relative to its price level makes it the strongest income anchor among liquid areas. Business Bay remains defensible for tenants prioritising corporate proximity, but its rental premium is under pressure from mid-tier competition. If Majan's rental rate does not firm toward a level more consistent with its capital values over the next two quarters, it risks repricing as a yield trap rather than an income play. The falsifiable marker: if marketwide median rents per sqm fail to recover above the trailing six-month average by June, rental supply pressure is structural, not seasonal, and landlords should budget for flat-to-negative rental growth through year-end.

Price Distribution

Price Spread Reveals a Two-Tier Market Where Area Selection Is the Decision

The price distribution across Dubai's most active areas in March 2026 is not a bell curve — it is a structurally split market where entry-level corridors and premium urban cores occupy distinct pricing bands with limited overlap. The boxplot makes this bifurcation visible: one cluster of areas trades in the mid-teens per sqm, while a second band sits nearly double that level. This is not noise or outlier distortion — it reflects a durable segmentation between affordable high-throughput corridors and capital-intensive urban positions. The practical implication is that area selection IS the investment decision right now. In a tight distribution, investors can diversify across geographies without meaningfully altering their price exposure. The current spread offers no such luxury. An investor entering Jumeirah Village Circle, Majan, or Dubai South is making a fundamentally different capital commitment per square metre than one targeting Business Bay or Palm Deira, where per-sqm pricing runs roughly 70–90% higher. The interquartile range spanning these five corridors alone stretches across a band wide enough that moving from the lower quartile to the upper quartile nearly doubles the capital deployed per unit of space. What the boxplot also reveals is where the outliers sit — or rather, where they do not. No area among the top five has recently migrated from one pricing cluster to the other. The affordable band and the premium band are stable formations, not transitional. This means convergence is not underway: lower-priced areas are not repricing upward toward the premium tier, and premium corridors are not correcting downward. For portfolio construction, this signals that blending exposure across both bands is a deliberate diversification choice rather than a hedge against mean reversion. Investors seeking income should anchor in the lower pricing band, where rental yields compensate for modest capital values. Appreciation-oriented capital belongs in the upper band, particularly Business Bay and Palm Deira, where liquidity depth supports exit optionality. If the spread between these two clusters narrows by more than 10% over the next two quarters — whether through the bottom rising or the top softening — it would mark the first evidence of regime convergence and warrant a rebalancing review.

Developer Landscape

Developer Business Models Under Stress: Volume Players Most Exposed

The developer landscape in March reveals a market where business model differentiation matters more than brand prestige, and the horizontal bar chart ranking developers by transaction volume makes the strategic segmentation visible at a glance. Volume-driven developers — those operating predominantly in corridors like Jumeirah Village Circle, Majan, and Dubai South — depend on sell-through velocity to sustain thinner per-unit margins. Their model works when absorption rates hold, but the sharp contraction in monthly transactions puts precisely this cohort under the most pressure. When marketwide deal flow compresses by a third, throughput-dependent economics suffer disproportionately because fixed marketing, brokerage, and construction-finance costs do not flex downward at the same pace. Developers concentrated in the sub-AED 17,000 per sqm band need to watch whether their April sell-through recovers alongside broader volumes or whether inventory begins to accumulate — the latter scenario historically precedes either price incentives or delayed phase launches. Premium-positioned developers operating at price points closer to the Business Bay and Palm Deira range face a fundamentally different calculus. Each transaction carries substantially more revenue per square metre, so a lower deal count does not automatically compress margins. The critical signal for this segment is whether new launch pricing holds above or retreats toward the existing resale curve. So far, pricing in the upper tier has shown minimal erosion relative to the volume decline, which suggests that premium developers can ride out a one-month contraction without adjusting strategy. Their risk is slower, more structural: if gross yields continue to compress without rental growth catching up, the buyer pool for high-ticket units narrows to pure capital-appreciation plays, which are inherently more sentiment-sensitive. The strategically interesting middle — developers with moderate pricing and respectable absorption across diversified corridors — occupies the most defensible position in the current environment. Majan's performance illustrates this dynamic: its pricing clusters near the affordable end while sustaining volumes that rival much more established corridors. Developers active in this band can attract both income-oriented buyers drawn by above-market yields and price-sensitive end-users priced out of premium cores. That dual demand channel provides a buffer when macro sentiment shifts. Given the volume stress diagnosed across the market, throughput-dependent developers are most exposed over the next two to three months. If April's registrations fail to recover meaningfully, expect the first signs of launch deferrals or soft incentives — particularly buyer-facing fee absorption or post-handover payment extensions — from volume players in the sub-AED 17,000 per sqm segment. Premium developers are best positioned to hold pricing through a shallow contraction, but any sustained yield compression would erode the investment case that underpins their buyer base. The falsifiable trigger: if any major volume-segment developer announces a launch deferral or publicly adjusts payment plans before June, it confirms that the velocity model has reached its absorption ceiling in this cycle.

Market Outlook

April's Registration Count Will Decide Whether March Was Noise or Signal

The central question for Q2 2026 is binary: was March a calendar-driven air pocket or the opening act of a broader demand correction? The weight of evidence tilts toward the former, but the market will not have to wait long for confirmation. April registrations are the decisive data point. A recovery toward the trailing three-month transaction average would confirm that Ramadan timing distorted March and that underlying demand remains structurally intact. Conversely, a second consecutive month of materially depressed volumes would force a reassessment — particularly for throughput-dependent developers operating in the affordable band, where launch deferrals and soft buyer incentives would likely surface before any headline price adjustment. Pricing offers a clearer signal than volume right now. The year-on-year appreciation trend, while decelerating, has not broken. Sellers are holding rather than capitulating, and the absence of distressed supply in the secondary market supports price floors through at least mid-2026. The more vulnerable metric is rental income: the monthly rental decline outpaced the pricing dip by a wide margin, and if that divergence persists into May, yield compression will accelerate beyond the levels already observed, particularly in corridors where investors entered on income assumptions rather than capital-gain theses. Three scenarios frame the next 90 days. The base case — April volumes recover to within striking distance of early-2026 norms and year-on-year pricing growth holds above 3% — keeps the market in orderly deceleration mode, a healthy transition after years of rapid appreciation. The upside case requires a catalyst: regulatory easing, a new visa category, or a significant infrastructure announcement could pull forward demand that paused during Ramadan. The downside tail emerges only if April prints another sub-9,000 transaction month and year-on-year price growth dips below 3%, a combination that historically precedes flat-to-negative quarterly returns. Income-focused investors should use the current yield dispersion to position selectively in the affordable band, where gross yields still exceed prevailing financing costs. Appreciation-oriented capital should wait for April's data before adding exposure to the premium tier, where the implied growth required to justify current entry prices leaves less margin for error. The single print that resolves this outlook is April's transaction count — watch it closely.

Three patterns in the March data warrant close monitoring through Q2. First, the rental correction outpaced the sales correction by a wide margin — rents weakened far more aggressively than capital values, a divergence that typically self-corrects either through price softening or rental recovery within one to two quarters. If rents stabilise in April while prices drift lower, gross yields could widen enough to pull sidelined income capital back into the market. Second, Majan's emergence as a volume centre that rivals far more established corridors on throughput while maintaining a yield premium points to a possible reclassification — the market may be creating a new mid-tier category between affordable volume plays and premium urban cores. Third, geopolitical headwinds are no longer theoretical: regional equity markets have already absorbed material losses tied to escalating conflict8, and Asian family offices are actively stress-testing their UAE exposure9. If cross-border capital inflows decelerate through Q2, the concentration of activity into a narrow set of corridors will intensify further, starving peripheral areas of the liquidity they need to sustain pricing. The catalyst to watch is April's transaction count paired with the rental print — a volume recovery above the trailing quarterly average with stable rents confirms a calendar-driven dip, while a second consecutive weak month with softening rents marks the start of a repricing cycle that favours patient buyers over momentum-driven allocators.

Key Figures

Metric	Mar 2026	MoM	YoY	Feb 2026	MoM	YoY	Jan 2026
Transactions	8,946	-33.6%	-27.9%	13,468	-6.2%	+7.9%	14,357
Total Value (AED)	18.7B	-36.5%	-33.0%	29.4B	-13.9%	+7.8%	34.1B
Median Price per sqm (AED)	18,504	-1.9%	+5.0%	18,862	-2.3%	+12.6%	19,297
Median Rent per sqm (AED)	1,071	-12.0%	-3.6%	1,218	+4.0%	+6.6%	1,171
Gross Yield (%)	5.8	-67 bp	-51 bp	6.5	+39 bp	-36 bp	6.1

MoM: month-over-month change · YoY: same month, prior year