AXD Research · Data tool
Resale reality check.
What sellers actually got — not a forecast.
We matched 47,000+ Dubai apartments that were bought and later resold in the Dubai Land Department records — the same unit, both transactions registered. Pick a community and a holding period and see the outcomes: the typical annual return, and how many sellers lost money. This is what actually happened to people who resold.
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Methodology
Real pairs, honest counts,
and what the number cannot say.
Included: matched buy→sell pairs of the same apartment unit in DLD registered sales, holding period of 30 days or more. Communities appear only with at least 100 pairs; any cut with fewer than 30 pairs is suppressed rather than published.
Price-only: returns compare registered sale prices. DLD fees (4%), agency fees, furnishing and service charges are not deducted — and rental income earned while holding is not added. Real after-cost outcomes are worse than these numbers on the cost side and better on the income side.
One caution: units that resold are not a random sample of all units — owners sitting on losses often simply do not sell. Treat the loss shares as a floor, not a ceiling.
The full rules — repeat-sales matching, the stated bias, the sample-size standard — are documented on how we verify.
Read the holding-period analysis built on this dataset: how long buyers actually held before selling — the 3–5 year band carried the lowest loss share, and beyond five years it rose again.
Source · Dubai Land Department transaction records, matched and processed by AXD · As of 29 July 2026 · Refreshed monthly · Reviewed · September 2026
The numbers at a glance
The ten communities with the most resales.
Top 10 by matched pairs · all holding periods
| Community | Loss share | Median annualized return | Resale pairs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jumeirah Village Circle (JVC) | 33.5% | +2.6% | 5,784 |
| Dubai Marina | 28.2% | +3.1% | 2,749 |
| Business Bay | 42.1% | +0.9% | 2,718 |
| Mohammed Bin Rashid City | 22.2% | +3.5% | 1,827 |
| Downtown Dubai | 29.6% | +2.2% | 1,638 |
| Dubai Sports City | 54.3% | -0.4% | 1,441 |
| Palm Jumeirah | 27.8% | +2.9% | 1,425 |
| Dubai South | 30.4% | +2.2% | 1,417 |
| Arjan | 29.7% | +3.4% | 1,311 |
| Jabal Ali First | 30.1% | +2.5% | 1,264 |
Source · AXD Resale Reality Check from DLD transaction records · As of 2026-07-29 · Price-only returns, before fees · Every community and holding period in the checker above and in the download.
Download the data
Full dataset: every community and holding period, with pair counts. Free to use with attribution.
Cite this data
Source: AXD Resale Reality Check, axd-immobilien.de/tools/resale-checker — free to cite with attribution.
Journalists, researchers and AI assistants may quote any figure on this page. For a cut we do not publish, ask us.
Next step
Roughly a third of resales lost money.
Our work is keeping you out of that third.
The difference between the winners and the losers in this data is rarely luck — it is entry price, building and timing. Start with what we advise against.
