UAE housing market 2026: prices, costs, and selling FSBO

The headline is a market still climbing year on year but catching its breath month to month. The Bayut index puts the average Dubai apartment at AED 1,929 per square foot in the second quarter of 2026, which works out to roughly AED 1.93 million for a 1,000 square foot unit. Abu Dhabi runs a touch higher at AED 2,003 per square foot. The UAE quotes prices per square foot rather than per square meter, so those are the numbers you will see on every listing.

The direction matters as much as the level. On the REIDIN sales price index for May 2026, Dubai was up 3.58 percent over the year but down 1.07 percent on the month, while Abu Dhabi was up a striking 23.77 percent year on year and down 0.37 percent on the month. That pattern, strong annual gains paired with a slight monthly cooling, repeats across the emirates this spring, and Dubai's annual pace has itself been easing through the year. The market is decelerating from a fast run, not reversing.

Our own listing read measures a narrower slice than the index. Across 30 live listings we pulled on 23 June 2026 from Bayut and Property Finder in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, a typical 2-bedroom Dubai apartment sat at a median asking price near AED 1,587,748, with the wider 2-to-3-bedroom field running from about AED 900,000 to AED 7,000,000. Mid-market 2-bedroom units cluster around AED 1.5 million to 1.7 million. That median is a single unit type rather than the whole market, so it naturally lands below the per-square-foot index headline, which blends all apartment sizes. A single emirate-wide figure is a starting point; the comparable sales in your own building and community will tell you far more.

The UAE is one of the cheapest major markets to sell in, mostly because of what is missing. There is no annual property tax and no capital gains tax on residential property, so the proceeds of a sale are not taxed the way they are in much of Europe or the United States. What you pay are transaction fees, and several of them customarily fall on the buyer.

The agent commission is the standard 2 percent of the sale price plus 5 percent VAT, about 2.1 percent all in. By long-standing convention in Dubai and the wider UAE secondary market, the buyer usually pays that commission on a resale, though it is negotiable and a seller may absorb part of it in a softer market. On off-plan purchases the developer typically pays the broker directly. The larger 4 percent DLD transfer fee is legally split 2 percent buyer and 2 percent seller, but in current practice the buyer frequently pays the whole 4 percent.

That leaves a seller with a fairly small and partly optional bill: a developer NOC fee of roughly AED 1,000 to 5,000, a trustee office fee of about AED 4,000 to 5,000 plus VAT, a DLD admin fee of a few hundred dirhams, and a mortgage discharge fee near AED 1,290 to 1,560 if there is an outstanding loan. On our AED 2,000,000 example, a seller who only carries the fees customarily assigned to the seller side could pay as little as around AED 5,000; whoever takes on the agent commission carries about AED 42,000 for it, so a typical all-in seller bill lands near AED 49,000 depending on how the fees are split.

Selling your own property is fully legal in the UAE, and listings can even be marked direct from owner. The reality is that the market is overwhelmingly broker-driven, and true owner-direct resale is still relatively uncommon. That is less about any legal barrier and more about the mechanics: a resale transfer runs through a DLD-registered trustee office, and most communities require a developer no-objection certificate (NOC) before the title can change hands.

Going agent-free means doing the broker's job yourself. You price the home against live comparables, market it, vet buyers, agree terms, obtain the NOC, and book and attend the trustee office appointment where the transfer is registered. None of these steps requires a licensed broker, but each one is real work, and the trustee and NOC process is non-negotiable whether or not an agent is involved. Anyone.com, our current pick for owner-direct listing, is free to list on with no commission.

The payoff is the commission. Because the buyer customarily pays the 2 percent in a UAE resale, the saving from selling yourself is not always a straight line off your proceeds, but in any deal where you would have absorbed that fee, going direct keeps roughly AED 42,000 on a AED 2,000,000 sale. The cleaner win is control over the price and the process, since the trustee-office mechanics are the same either way.