How to read the consultancies' Dubai market reports, firm by firm

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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A broker in Dubai rarely quotes the land register directly. The number that reaches a client is more often a line from a consultancy report: prices up 9 per cent, 55,600 homes due this year, the pipeline above 220,000 units. Each of those lines is true to the report it comes from. Put side by side, they do not agree, and in 2026 the gaps between them have been wide.

This guide reads the reports of five firms that publish regularly on Dubai homes: Knight Frank, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield Core, Savills and ValuStrat. It describes the position as read in October 2026, from the firms' own pages and releases and from press reports of them, each named and dated in the sentence. For each firm it sets out what was published for 2026, what the page says about how the figure was made, and what it leaves unsaid. Every figure below belongs to its publisher: none is an official statistic, and the forecasts are the firms' views, reported as such. Two parts of the subject could not be read during research, the reports of JLL and the price data of the property portals, and they are named as open points at the end and not described from memory.

Knight Frank release of 2 February 2026; Cushman & Wakefield Core first-half report, as reported by Khaleej Times on 20 August 2026; ValuStrat page of 18 February 2026.

Three ways to arrive at a price

Before any firm is read, it helps to separate three things a "price change" can be.

A transaction-based figure starts from sales that took place: an average price per square foot of what sold, or a comparison of what the same kind of home fetched in two periods. Savills works this way in its second-quarter release, carried by Zawya on 15 July 2026, which gives an average price per square foot for "mainstream" apartments and villas and a separate "like-for-like" reading drawn from more than 500 transactions.

A valuation-based figure starts from valuers' opinions of what a fixed set of homes is worth today, whether or not any of them sold. ValuStrat says so in plain words: its second-quarter release, carried by Zawya on 21 July 2026, describes the ValuStrat Price Index as valuation-based and not transaction-driven.

An asking figure starts from what owners advertise. Gulf News, reporting ValuStrat's review of the second quarter of 2025, described the rent levels in it as average annual asking rents. So one report can hold a valuation index for capital values and asking figures for rents.

The three move differently. A transaction average shifts with the mix of homes that happened to sell; a valuation index rests on judgement instead; an asking figure records what sellers and landlords hope for. None of the pages read ranks one method above another, and nor does this guide: the point is to know which one a sentence is quoting.

What each firm's page says about its method

The second thing to check is how much the publisher tells the reader. On the pages read for this guide, the answer varies a great deal.

ValuStrat gives the most detail. Its release says the index marks to market a sample of properties representing more than 90 per cent of Dubai's residential and commercial markets, and that it is built by the firm's RICS Registered Valuers. The base is January 2021, set at 100. The release does not give the number of properties or locations in the sample.

Savills names its own report, the Dubai Residential Market in Minutes for the second quarter of 2026, and no outside data provider. It uses the word "prime" for transactions above AED 10 million. Knight Frank's release of 2 February 2026 uses the word prime without stating a threshold, and counts separately the sales above US$10 million. Two firms can therefore both report on "prime" Dubai and be counting different homes.

The summary pages of CBRE, dated 22 April 2026, and of Cushman & Wakefield Core, dated 27 April 2026, name no data source and describe no method. Each sits in front of a longer report, and a reader who needs the definition has to look there.

Prices: three readings of the same year

Three firms put a number on Dubai home prices in the first half of 2026, and the three numbers describe different things.

Cushman & Wakefield Core, in its residential report for the first quarter dated 27 April 2026, said city-wide sale prices were up 9 per cent on a year earlier and flat on the previous quarter. Khaleej Times, on 11 February 2026, had reported the same firm as saying city-wide values rose 13 per cent in 2025, the 22nd consecutive quarter of growth.

ValuStrat, three months later, put its residential index at 220.0 points for the second quarter, down 4 per cent on the quarter and up 0.1 per cent on the year. Apartments stood at 169.1 points, down 3.7 per cent on the quarter and 3 per cent on the year; villas at 293.7 points, down 4.2 per cent on the quarter. Its prime index was 234 points, down 4.5 per cent on the quarter and up 1.1 per cent on the year. The firm also gave a "typical" value: AED 1.79 million for an apartment and AED 13 million for a villa.

Savills, for the same second quarter, gave mainstream apartments at AED 1,960 per square foot, down around 4 per cent on the quarter, and mainstream villas and townhouses at AED 1,646 per square foot, down about 0.8 per cent. Its like-for-like reading was an adjustment of about 5 to 7 per cent, with some locations down by up to 10 per cent, and it added that prices remained above their level of a year before. Andrew Cummings, head of residential agency at Savills, described the quarter in the release as "not a broad-based correction but rather a normalisation of activity".

The ValuStrat release lists monthly falls of 6 per cent in March, 2 per cent in April and 1 per cent in each of May and June, and a cumulative fall of 10 per cent since late February. A worked example checks that the figures hold together: multiplying 0.94 by 0.98, 0.99 and 0.99 gives about 0.903, a fall of about 9.7 per cent over the four months, which rounds to the 10 per cent stated. The three months of the second quarter alone, 0.98 by 0.99 by 0.99, give about 0.960, the 4 per cent quarterly fall. The year-on-year figure of plus 0.1 per cent is the same index seen from further away: twelve months that hold both the rises of 2025 and the falls of spring 2026.

That is why "up 9 per cent", "flat on the year" and "down 4 per cent" could all be printed within three months. The first is an annual change measured at the end of March. The second is an annual change measured at the end of June. The third is a quarterly change. On valuations, ValuStrat's own figure for 2025 was 19.8 per cent, given in its outlook of 21 January 2026, against the 13 per cent Cushman & Wakefield reported for the same year. The two firms do not measure the same basket in the same way, and neither page reconciles its number with the other's.

Sales volumes: nearly the same count, not quite

On the number of sales, the firms sit much closer together.

For the first quarter of 2026, CBRE's page counts more than 45,000 residential transactions in Dubai worth AED 137 billion, with a notable slowdown in March. For the second quarter, Savills counts 35,884 residential transactions, down 19 per cent on the first, and ValuStrat counts 35,465, down 20 per cent. The two second-quarter totals differ by 419 sales, a little over 1 per cent.

A worked example runs the two back to the first quarter. Savills' 35,884, taken as 81 per cent of the previous quarter, implies about 44,300. ValuStrat's 35,465, taken as 80 per cent, implies about 44,330. Both land a little under CBRE's "over 45,000". The percentages are rounded, so the test is rough, but it is consistent with three firms counting from closely related records and drawing the edge of "residential sale" in slightly different places.

The split by type agrees as well. Savills puts off-plan homes, those sold before completion, at 76 per cent of residential transactions in the quarter. ValuStrat gives the same share and the detail behind it: 27,113 off-plan registrations worth AED 63.7 billion, down 24.1 per cent on a year earlier, and 8,011 sales of ready homes worth AED 21 billion, down 41.5 per cent. Those two lines add up to 35,124, which is 341 short of the firm's own total of 35,465; the release does not say what the remainder is.

Neither release names the source of its counts. ValuStrat's release uses the term Oqood for off-plan registrations. Knight Frank's annual figures, 205,400 deals worth AED 544.2 billion in 2025, up 18 and 25 per cent, are likewise presented as its analysis.

The 2026 supply estimates, side by side

Supply is where the published numbers stop resembling each other.

The bars are not five opinions about one quantity. The upper three are scheduled supply: what the pipeline says is due. Knight Frank's release says more than 160,000 units could enter the market in 2026 "based on the registered projects pipeline". ValuStrat's page of 18 February 2026 counts 131,234 units scheduled for delivery in the year, about 81 per cent of them apartments; by its July release the figure, now called a preliminary full-year target, was 129,066.

The lower two are expected completions: what the publisher thinks will be finished. Cushman & Wakefield Core's first-half report, as reported by Khaleej Times on 20 August 2026, expects around 55,600 units for the full year, which the newspaper called the highest annual completion volume since 2008, and more than 60,000 in 2027. Khaleej Times had used about 55,000 for 2026 and about 75,000 for 2027 in February, without naming a firm.

Both kinds of publisher say the scheduled figure will not be met in full. Knight Frank's release, which carries the largest number, also carries the caution: its partner Shehzad Jamal says "the completion rate is likely to be far lower" than the data suggests. The same ValuStrat page calls its own 131,234 "vulnerable to downward revision". Knight Frank gives the scale: a long-term average of 36,000 homes a year over twenty years. A worked example: 160,000 is about 4.4 times that average.

The same care applies to the pipeline as a whole. ValuStrat's February page counts more than 220,000 homes under construction, listing 187,676 apartments and 39,291 villas and townhouses. Cushman & Wakefield Core, in August, speaks of nearly 525,000 planned units, of which about 186,000, or about 35 per cent, had passed 20 per cent construction progress. Khaleej Times in February wrote of more than 400,000 units under construction or planned for 2026 to 2030. "Under construction", "planned" and "under construction or planned" are three different nets.

Deliveries so far: three counts of one half-year

If forecasts differ, counts of what has already been handed over might be expected to agree. For the first half of 2026 they do not.

Savills counts about 27,300 homes handed over in the second quarter alone, made up of about 17,400 apartments and 9,900 villas and townhouses. ValuStrat counts about 20,000 completions for the whole half-year, 15,039 apartments and 5,218 villas, and sets them against its target: 15 per cent of 129,066. Cushman & Wakefield Core counts more than 13,218 for the second quarter, under half of the Savills figure for the same three months.

None of the releases defines the event being counted. "Handed over", "completed" and "delivered" may or may not refer to the same step in a building's life, and the pages do not say which record each firm relies on. That is an open point, and it is the first thing to ask when a delivery figure is quoted.

There is a second, smaller lesson inside one firm's own series. In April, Cushman & Wakefield Core gave about 8,100 units for the first quarter and about 42,000 more for the rest of the year, a total of about 50,100, "subject to supply chain constraints and market conditions". In August its full-year figure was 55,600, with around 32,000 still to come in the second half. A worked example: 55,600 less 32,000 leaves 23,600 for the first half; taking off the 13,218 of the second quarter leaves about 10,400 for the first quarter, against the 8,100 published in April. The second-quarter figure is stated as a minimum, so the sum is approximate, but it shows that a count for a past quarter can move between editions.

ValuStrat's share is the starkest reading of the half-year. If 15 per cent of the scheduled homes were complete at the halfway mark, about 109,000 remained scheduled for the second half, a worked figure from the firm's own numbers. The firm does not say it expects them, and its earlier page says the opposite.

Forecast against outcome: what the firms themselves report

Three publishers have put numbers on how past schedules compared with what was built.

The two official lines add up to 36,192. Gulf News, reporting ValuStrat's review of the second quarter of 2025, gave the firm's expectation at that time: more than 17,000 homes completed so far in 2025 and 66,596 expected by the end of the year. A worked example sets the outcome against that mid-year figure: 36,192 is about 54 per cent of 66,596. The firm's own 59 per cent is measured against "initial forecasts", a number its page does not print; 36,000 is 59 per cent of about 61,000. Either way, a little over half of what was scheduled arrived.

Even the outcome for 2025 depends on who is counting. ValuStrat gives about 36,000. Knight Frank's February release gives 39,700 units for 2025 and 30,500 for 2024. Khaleej Times, on 11 February 2026, gave about 46,700 homes delivered in 2025 without naming its source. The highest of the three is about 10,500 above the lowest.

Knight Frank's release attaches a percentage to each count. Re-read for this guide, it says the "proportion of homes completed on time" improved to 64 per cent in 2025, of 39,700 units, after "a 50% completion rate" in 2024, of 30,500 units. The release does not say against which schedule "on time" is measured, so the two percentages cannot be set directly beside ValuStrat's 59 per cent.

The longest view comes from Cushman & Wakefield Core, in an article of 29 October 2018 titled as a mismatch between supply forecasts and actual deliveries. It put realisation rates, meaning delivered units as a share of announced units, at about 40 to 50 per cent over the previous five to seven years, and said deliveries had not exceeded 18,000 to 21,000 units a year over the previous five. It listed the reasons a project slips: suppliers, funding, legal and compliance steps, and outside forces acting on investor demand. That article describes the years before 2018 and says nothing about 2026; it is a dated precedent for the pattern the 2026 releases describe again.

For the current year the firms add fresh reasons for caution. Savills reports developers extending delivery timelines from about three years to four. Cushman & Wakefield Core said in April that a prolonged regional conflict could lead to handover delays later in the year. ValuStrat's January outlook notes that annual delivery forecasts have historically been revised.

Why the reports differ from each other and from the register

Pulling the cases above together, the differences fall into six kinds, each visible on the pages.

The instrument. A valuation index, a transaction average and an asking figure are different measurements. ValuStrat's 19.8 per cent and Cushman & Wakefield's 13 per cent for 2025 are the clearest pair.

The period and the comparison. Annual, quarterly and monthly changes can point in opposite directions in the same release, as ValuStrat's plus 0.1 per cent and minus 4 per cent do.

The segment. "Prime" is above AED 10 million at Savills and undefined in Knight Frank's release; "mainstream" is Savills' own category; "city-wide" is Cushman & Wakefield Core's.

The event. A sale can be counted as off-plan or ready, primary or secondary; a home can be scheduled, expected, handed over, completed or delivered.

The edition. Figures are revised. ValuStrat's 2026 schedule moved from 131,234 to 129,066; Cushman & Wakefield Core's 2026 total moved from about 50,100 to 55,600.

The source. Most of the pages read name none. Where ValuStrat cites "official data", for 2025 deliveries and for a housing stock of about 855,927 units entering 2024, it says so; elsewhere the reader is not told whether a count is the register's or the firm's own.

On the last point, the comparison with the Dubai Land Department is limited by what was read. No 2026 figure from the department was read for this guide, so no firm's number is tested against the register here. What the pages support is narrower: the firms' second-quarter sales counts sit within about 1 per cent of each other, while their price and supply figures are their own constructions.

Forecasts made in January, read in October

Each firm's outlook carries a date, and 2026 shows why the date matters.

ValuStrat's outlook of 21 January 2026 projected residential capital values rising by about 10 per cent in 2026, after 19.8 per cent in 2025, with rents broadly flat. The release, re-read for this guide, says villas and townhouses "are forecast to increase by 17.7%" and apartments by 7.4 per cent in 2026. Haider Tuaima, the firm's head of real estate research, said in that release that performance was "likely to become more segmented". Knight Frank, on 2 February, forecast prime prices up around 3 per cent and the mainstream market up around 1 per cent by the end of December 2026.

By 22 April, CBRE's page spoke of regional tensions, travel disruptions from early March and downgraded near-term growth forecasts. By 21 July, ValuStrat's own index was 4 per cent lower on the quarter. Its rental index, at 205.8 points, was unchanged on the quarter and up 1.7 per cent on the year, which is close to the flat rents of the January base case; Savills, measuring differently, reported rents in major communities down by an average of 8 to 10 per cent.

The January and February forecasts were views formed before the falls ValuStrat dates from late February. A forecast quoted in October should carry the month it was made.

A supply figure is a schedule until someone counts the keys, and in 2026 even the counts of keys come in three sizes.

Questions to ask of any figure

The cases in this guide reduce to a short list of nine questions.

1. Who published it, and on what date? A figure without a publisher and a month cannot be compared with anything.
2. Is it a sale, a valuation or an asking figure? If the page does not say, the full report may; if neither does, the figure is quoted with that gap named.
3. Which homes does it cover? City-wide, prime, mainstream, freehold only, apartments or villas, and where the threshold sits.
4. Which change is it? On the month, the quarter or the year, and measured at the end of which period.
5. For a volume: what is included? Off-plan and ready, primary and secondary, residential only or with commercial, and whether the parts add up to the total.
6. For supply: is it scheduled or expected? A registered pipeline, a developer schedule and a firm's own estimate of completions are three numbers.
7. For deliveries: what event is counted? Handover, completion and delivery are used on different pages without definition.
8. Has the publisher revised it? The latest edition is the one to quote, and the earlier one shows how far the series moves.
9. What does the publisher say about its own record? ValuStrat and Cushman & Wakefield Core have each published how past forecasts compared with outcomes.

Open points

Several parts of the subject are left open here because the pages were not read or do not say.

JLL's reports on Dubai were not read: the one page tried led only to the firm's home page, so nothing is said here about its measures or figures. The property portals' price reports were not read either, so their asking-price data is not described. No Knight Frank or CBRE figure later than April 2026 was read. The full reports behind the CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield Core, Savills and Knight Frank pages may define sources and methods that their summaries omit. The size of ValuStrat's valuation sample is not stated on the pages read. Knight Frank's release does not say against which schedule its on-time percentages are measured. And no publisher read for this guide defines the moment at which a home counts as delivered.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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