How the Dubai Land Department uses artificial intelligence, by service

In this article

Written by

Kooky

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

About Kooky and Shaka →

Artificial intelligence is no longer a side project at the Dubai Land Department. Between September 2020 and September 2026 the department, the Dubai government body that includes the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA), announced AI at work in at least seven places: the valuation of a home, the benchmark that decides whether a rent may rise, the daily checking of property adverts on listing portals, the registration of off-plan projects and sales by developers, and three services that answer questions from customers and investors.

Those announcements arrived one press release at a time, and each used its own vocabulary. This guide puts them side by side. For each service it sets out what the department says the system does, who feels it in practice, and what the releases actually report as results. That last point matters, because only one of the seven comes with measured figures. Everything below is taken from the department's own releases and from the Government of Dubai Media Office; where those texts are silent, the guide says so instead of filling the gap.

Dubai Land Department release of 24 April 2025 for the advert figures, counted since the platform's launch at GITEX 2024; Dubai Media Office release of 3 September 2026 for the federal target, set over two years.

Six years of announcements, in order

The guide covers only what the Dubai Land Department itself describes as artificial intelligence. The department runs many other digital services, from mobile apps to permit systems, and most of them are ordinary software. They are left aside here unless an AI service depends on them.

The sequence helps to read the rest. The oldest project concerns valuation and dates from 2020. The advertising platform followed at the GITEX technology exhibition in 2024. The rental benchmark opened 2025. A cluster of customer-facing tools was presented at GITEX Global 2025, which the department's preview release dated from 13 to 17 October 2025. The developer platform is the newest, launched in September 2026.

One piece of context sits above all of this. The Dubai Media Office release on Initial Registration ties the launch to a framework announced by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, under which 50 per cent of UAE government sectors, services and operations are to run through autonomous, self-executing AI models, known as agentic AI, within two years. The department's releases also place its AI work under two Dubai plans, the Dubai Real Estate Strategy 2033 and the Dubai Economic Agenda D33.

Initial Registration: one platform for the developer journey

Initial Registration is aimed at developers, the companies that build and sell projects in Dubai. According to the release published by the Dubai Media Office and by the department on 3 September 2026, the platform brings together three services: registering a project, registering the real estate transactions made in it, and managing the project's escrow account. The escrow account is the bank account that holds buyers' payments for a project under construction.

The launch was held at a ceremony at Grand Hyatt Dubai, attended by the department's Acting Director General, whom the release does not name, with chief executives and representatives of the public and private sectors. The release says implementation and user training were carried out in phases, so that users were prepared and workflows were tested before full rollout.

The AI in the platform does a specific and fairly modest job, which is to read documents. The release names three kinds: Emirates IDs, passports and sales contracts. The system extracts the relevant data from them and fills in the fields of the application automatically. The department presents this as a way to cut manual entry and improve accuracy.

Two further features are described as part of the same design, without being called AI in the text. A short series of guided questions directs the user to the correct procedure, so that the developer's staff do not have to know in advance which form applies. And when an application is missing a piece of information, the user can add it while the transaction stays open. The release says this reduces resubmissions for minor omissions: the file is completed where it stands instead of being sent back to the start.

What approval on submission means, and what is not defined

The most far-reaching feature is automatic approval. The release words it carefully, in two sentences that say slightly different things. Standard transactions that meet the requirements can be processed automatically. Registrations that comply with business rules are eligible for approval upon submission.

Read together, the two sentences describe a filter. A transaction that is standard, and that passes every rule the system holds, need not wait for an officer to open it. The release does not say that every application is approved by a machine, and the word "eligible" leaves room for cases that still go to review.

Several things a developer would want to know are not in the text. The release does not list the business rules. It does not say what makes a transaction "standard", what share of applications is expected to qualify, or how long a non-standard file takes. It does not say what happens when an automatically approved registration later proves to contain an error. It also does not name any earlier system that the platform replaces. These are open points, and a developer's compliance team would need the platform's own documentation or the department's guidance to settle them.

Eng. Abdullah Ahmed Al Shehi, chief executive of RERA at the department, is quoted in the Dubai Media Office release saying the launch "represents an investment in the real estate sector's efficiency".

Project 360, shared accounts and the escrow banks

Alongside registration, the platform gives each developer a dashboard called Project 360. The release describes it as a consolidated view of each project that covers five things: the status of units, the escrow accounts, financial data, project records, and early warning indicators. The indicators are there, in the department's words, to flag challenges so that intervention can come in time. The release does not say which measures trigger a warning or who receives it first, the developer or the regulator.

Account structure is the practical change for larger groups. A single account lets a developer manage several companies and monitor their projects. Inside the account, permissions are defined and the roles of submitting a transaction and reviewing it are separate. A developer can therefore have one member of staff prepare a registration and another check it before it reaches the department.

The third party to the platform is the bank. The release says Initial Registration improves coordination among developers, the department and the banks that manage escrow accounts, with clearer procedural stages and responsibilities for each of them. It adds that data can be reused across connected systems, which is meant to reduce discrepancies between three sets of records that ought to agree: sales, escrow accounts and ownership.

For an off-plan buyer, none of this is visible directly. The buyer does not log in to Initial Registration. What the design promises, if it works as described, is that the sale recorded by the developer, the money recorded by the bank and the entry recorded by the department are drawn from the same data.

AI on the listing portals: the advertising platform

The second service is the one with numbers. The department calls it the AI-powered Real Estate Advertising Governance Platform and says it was launched during GITEX 2024. On 24 April 2025, in a release timed with Dubai AI Week, which ran from 21 to 25 April, it published the first results.

The platform watches property advertisements on the large listing portals. The release names three: Property Finder, Dubizzle and Bayut. It says the platform monitors adverts daily to ensure they comply with established standards and regulations. Since launch, it had monitored more than 279,000 advertisements, and 29 per cent of the monitored listings had been automatically modified using artificial intelligence.

A worked example gives the scale. Taking 279,000 as the base, the lowest figure consistent with "more than 279,000", 29 per cent comes to 80,910 listings. That number is computed here from the two published figures; the department did not publish it.

Ali Abdullah Al Ali, director of the Real Estate Control Department at RERA, said in the release that the results reaffirm the department's commitment to advancing market oversight through technology.

The limits of the release are as instructive as its figures. It does not say what the system checks in an advert, whether the price, the permit number, the description, the photographs or something else. It does not explain what "modified" means in practice, or whether the broker who placed the advert is told before or after the change. It gives no count of violations, says nothing about penalties, and does not describe what happens to an advert that cannot be corrected.

The QR code that ties an advert to its permit

The April 2025 release links the AI platform to an older control, which is the piece a member of the public can actually see. Through RERA, the department had earlier introduced an electronic service called Madmoun inside its Trakheesi system, the system through which advertising permits are issued. Madmoun generates a QR code for every real estate advertisement permit.

The rule that follows is stated plainly in the release: all real estate companies must display this QR code on all their real estate advertisements, whether visual or written. A customer who scans it can check that the advertisement is authentic and approved by RERA.

Put the two together and the logic of the system appears. The permit and its QR code establish what a brokerage was authorised to advertise. The AI platform then compares, day after day, what is actually published on the portals with the standards the department applies. For a broker, the working consequence is that a published advert is read every day by the regulator's system. For a portal, it means the listings it carries are part of that routine. For a buyer or tenant, the visible sign remains the code on the advert.

Rents: the Smart Rental Index and the heatmap

The service with the widest reach is the rental benchmark, because, according to the department, it covers all residential areas of Dubai. The department launched the Smart Rental Index 2025 on 2 January 2025. Majid Al Marri, chief executive of the Real Estate Registration Sector, described it in the launch release in one sentence: "This index relies on artificial intelligence technologies and a building classification system." A later release, on 16 February 2025, calls the same tool the Smart Rent Index.

The launch release specifies that this includes key areas, special development zones and free zones. Its novelty is that it rates the building, not only the district. Each building is assessed against four groups of criteria: its technical and structural characteristics; the quality of its finishes and maintenance; its location and spatial value; and the services and facilities it offers, with maintenance, cleanliness and parking management given as examples. The February release adds the inputs of the calculation: the values of rental contracts in the building, average rental values in the area, and the building's classification.

The index does not set rents. It supplies the reference rent against which a proposed increase is measured, under a scale that the launch release attributes to Decree No. 34 of 2013. The release gives the two ends of that scale: where the current rent is less than 10 per cent below the average market rent, the permitted increase is zero, and the largest permitted increase is 20 per cent. Khalid Al Shaibani, director of the Rental Affairs Department, presented the detail at the launch.

The February 2025 release sets out how the index meets the notice rule, and this is where landlords and tenants feel the algorithm.

On results, the department is assertive but gives no measure. The February release says the index has helped stabilise rental prices and mitigate overall inflation in Dubai for 2025, without publishing an inflation figure or a rent series to support it. The numbers it does give describe the market the index governs: more than 900,000 rental contracts registered in 2024, 8 per cent more than in 2023. The department says the index will be updated regularly, and the launch release announces a plan to extend it to the commercial and industrial sectors, with no date.

The rental heatmap is the index's public face. In its closing release on GITEX Global 2025, dated 18 October 2025, the department presented the Dubai Rental Heatmap as a tool that uses artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to show rental value indicators for each housing unit within a building. It is intended for landlords and tenants. The release carries no usage figures.

Smart valuation, the oldest AI project

Valuation is where the department began. On 6 September 2020 it announced that the first stage of an artificial intelligence project for the smart valuation of real estate units was complete. The release describes a model that analyses millions of transactions and other data, and a process that no longer needs most of the documents previously required, because local databases and external systems are linked. The valuation team worked with a private-sector company, Crayon.

The output is a valuation certificate issued directly to the client through the department's app, Dubai REST. The 2020 release lists the path in six steps:

1. Select the type of user.
2. Choose the means of entry.
3. Submit the ID number and receive a verification number.
4. Review the owner's and the property's data, then select the property.
5. Submit the required documents and pay the fees through the Noqodi wallet.
6. Receive the payment confirmation, then the valuation certificate.

The figure attached to the project is a time: the department said it expected valuation to take 15 seconds. That was a projection made in 2020, and none of the later releases read for this guide reports a measured time, an accuracy rate or the number of certificates issued. The release also does not say which property types or areas the model covers; it speaks only of real estate units. In October 2025 the department's GITEX preview still listed Smart Valuation among its AI services, describing it as instant, AI-powered property assessment.

The investor assistant, Malik and the single service desk

The remaining three services answer questions instead of processing files.

The first is for investors. On 15 October 2025 the department announced a collaboration with Google Cloud and, with it, the DLD Investor AI Assistant, powered by Google's Gemini model and launched under the theme "Smart Dialogue, Smarter investments". The release says the assistant turns large volumes of real estate data into analytical insights and provides information on Dubai's investment environment and its key processes, for local and international investors, and that it will be available through the department's website. The same release mentions a second tool, Google NotebookLM, used to convert documents on real estate investment into interactive, AI-generated podcasts. It contains no figures and no dates for further features.

The second is Malik, the department's chatbot. A release of the same day, on a collaboration with Microsoft, describes Malik as available around the clock on WhatsApp, the department's website and its smart app, answering by text or voice. In its first phase it handles the most common enquiries. The stated plan is to extend it to the top 10 real estate transactions, including payments, registrations and data updates, which would move it from answering to executing. The release does not say when.

The third is behind the counter. The Microsoft collaboration introduces a unified customer relationship management system built on Microsoft Dynamics 365. It links the call centre, email, live chat, social media, the smart app and the website, so that a request made on one channel is visible on the others, and it gives staff what the release calls a 360-degree view of the customer, with AI-driven recommendations to support decisions. Here too, the release reports no measured result.

What the releases report, service by service

Set against one another, the seven services differ less in technology than in how much is published about them.

The pattern is consistent. The department publishes what a system is for at launch, and has so far followed up with outcome figures in one case, the advertising platform, in April 2025. Even there, the two figures describe activity, how many adverts were read and how many were changed, not accuracy: the release does not say how many of the automatic modifications were contested or reversed.

A launch release says what a system is built to do. Only a later count, published with its period, says what it did.

What changes for each party

For developers, the change is the most concrete. Project registration, sales registration and escrow management now sit in one place, documents are read by machine, and a compliant standard registration can be approved when it is submitted. The counterpart is visibility: Project 360 puts unit status, escrow and financial data in a single view with early warning indicators, in a system the regulator operates.

For brokerages, AI arrives through advertising. Every advert must carry the QR code of its permit, according to the department, and what appears on the three named portals is monitored daily, with close to three in ten monitored listings altered automatically in the first reporting period. The published texts do not describe a procedure for querying an automatic modification, so that question depends on the department's guidance in each case.

For landlords and tenants, the index is decisive at renewal. Whether an increase applies depends on two tests described by the department: notice at least 90 days before expiry, and eligibility under the index for that building. A landlord who meets one and not the other does not obtain the increase.

For owners and investors, the AI services are optional conveniences: a valuation certificate through the app, an assistant on the website, a chatbot on a messaging service. For all of them the same caution applies. What these tools return is information produced by a model from the department's data; the releases do not present any of it as a decision on an individual case, and where rights are at stake the governing text remains the law and the department's formal procedures.

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.

About Kooky and Shaka →