Dubai property market 2024 review: AED 761bn of transactions and villa prices up 31.6%
Dubai in 2024: 226,000 transactions worth AED 761bn (+36% and +20%) and 110,000 first-time investors, per the DLD. ValuStrat had prices up 27.5% — villas +31.6%, apartments +23.6%, Jumeirah Islands and Palm Jumeirah villas above 42%. Figures, leading districts and the September 2026 status.
2024 repeated 2023's growth rates almost exactly, which makes it easy to underrate. The Dubai Land Department (DLD) registered about 226,000 real estate transactions worth AED 761bn — up 36% by number and 20% by value, the same percentages as a year earlier but from a record base. It was also the year price growth broadened: in 2023 villas did most of the work; in 2024 apartments and mid-market districts caught up.
The headline figures
| Measure | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Real estate transactions (DLD) | 166,400+ | 226,000 (+36%) |
| Transaction value (DLD) | AED 634bn | AED 761bn (+20%) |
| Investment value (DLD) | AED 412bn | AED 526bn (+27%) |
| First-time investors | 71,002 | 110,000 (+55%) |
| All DLD procedures | 1.6 million | 2.78 million (+17%) |
| ValuStrat price index, year on year | +19.9% | +27.5% |
Industry summaries split the AED 761bn into roughly AED 522bn of sales across 180,000 deals and about AED 187bn of mortgages. Knight Frank, which counts residential sales only, put the year at around 169,000 homes. The difference is not an error: DLD transactions include land, commercial property, mortgages and gifts. We explain how to keep the series apart in how to read Land Department transaction data.
Prices and the districts that led
ValuStrat's December 2024 index was up 27.5% on the year and roughly double its pandemic level; villas +31.6%, apartments +23.6%, and a weighted average sale price of about AED 1,448 per sq ft. Knight Frank's estimate was more cautious at around 19%, but on its numbers apartments finally moved above their 2014 peak in the autumn, by 7.7%.
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| Segment (ValuStrat, 2024) | Annual change |
|---|---|
| Villas — Jumeirah Islands | +42.5% |
| Villas — Palm Jumeirah | +42.3% |
| Villas — Emirates Hills | +32.3% |
| Apartments — The Greens | +31% |
| Apartments — Palm Jumeirah | +28.3% |
| Apartments — The Views | +27.1% |
| Weakest villa market — Mudon | +13.5% |
A widely repeated version of these numbers — "villas +33%, apartments +25%" — does not match ValuStrat's own year-end report. The difference looks trivial until you use it to calculate a resale return.
What changed from 2023
Off-plan became the market: ValuStrat recorded 71% of December's home sales as off-plan. October set a monthly record of 20,460 transactions. Rents rose about 21% over the year (our rent review), pushing tenants towards buying. And the top end set its own record of 435 sales above $10m, almost a third of them on Palm Jumeirah.
A note on the "AED 893bn for the UAE" figure often quoted as the country's 2024 total. It was assembled by the press in January 2025 from incomplete data — Dubai for the full year, Sharjah for eleven months, Ajman for ten. Abu Dhabi's official full-year figure from ADREC was AED 96.2bn, not the AED 79bn in that summary. Useful as an order of magnitude; not a statistic.
Where things stand in September 2026
2025 closed at AED 917bn (our 2025 review). In 2026 the market moved into a correction, with sale prices down about 2.6% and rents about 9.5% over the first half. For anyone who bought off-plan in 2024 the consequence is practical: many of those buildings complete in 2026–2027, so the exit will be into a flat market and against thousands of simultaneous handovers, not into the rising one they bought in.
If you own a 2024 launch, check it against current district prices and the delivery dates of neighbouring buildings — our summer 2026 market review is the place to start.
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In the news
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