How to check a Dubai apartment price in the DLD registry: Dubai REST and DXB Interact

In most markets, there is no way to find out what units in a specific building actually sold for — only asking prices are visible. Dubai works the other way round: the Dubai Land Department (DLD) publishes registered transaction data openly, and any buyer can check a seller's asking price against what neighbours in the same building have actually paid in recent years.

Two official sources

• Dubai REST — DLD's own app. Its transaction-history or property-passport section shows a building's transaction history, including price, size and registration date. It is available in Arabic and English, with some services gated behind UAE Pass sign-in.
• DXB Interact — a platform built on the same DLD data, with a more usable interface: an area-and-building map, a filter for cash versus mortgage transactions, and price-per-square-foot trends by quarter. Data updates as new registrations land in the DLD registry.

Both tools show the same underlying data — the count and price of registered transactions, the date, and in many cases whether the deal was cash or mortgaged. The difference between them is interface convenience, not data completeness: both draw from the same source.

What to check before accepting a seller's price

1. Whether there are any transactions in this building at all in the past year. New, low-liquidity buildings may have few or none — use neighbouring towers from the same developer and complex as the benchmark instead.
2. Price per square foot, not the total. Units in the same building differ by floor, view and layout — compare the unit rate, not the headline number.
3. How recent the transactions are. A price from three years ago is not a benchmark on a fast-moving market — what matters is the last three to six months.
4. Deal type. Mortgaged transactions sometimes register at a price tied to the bank's approved amount rather than the open-market figure — worth keeping in mind when comparing.

Where the registry does not replace a bank's own valuation

The registry shows what has already happened, not what a bank will value this specific unit at today: the bank's own valuer visits, checks condition and view, and can land above or below the building's median in either direction. The registry is a negotiating and sanity-check tool against a seller's asking price — not a substitute for the bank valuation a mortgage requires.

A useful habit: cross-check the registry against quotes from a few different brokers on the same unit. If one names a figure well above the building's registered transactions, that is a reason to ask what it is based on.

For how the three different prices of one apartment relate to each other, see asking price, transaction price and bank valuation. And for telling a legitimate low price from a fraud pattern, see our guide to real estate fraud in the UAE.