Dubai offices: how to invest in commercial property, with registry data

For years foreign investors in Dubai looked almost exclusively at residential property: apartments, villas, short lets. Commercial felt like territory for funds and large groups. The Dubai Land Department registry says that line no longer holds. In the first ten months of 2026 offices moved AED 22.33 billion across 4,223 transactions, against AED 9.82 billion in the same period of 2025.

Small in count, heavy in value

Offices account for 3.07% of the transactions registered in Dubai in 2026, but 5.32% of the value traded. That is the first thing to understand here: few units change hands, and each one weighs almost twice the city average. The median ticket is AED 2.4 million for a median size of 1,052 sq ft, just under 98 square metres.

And the growth is not in volume, it is in price. Transactions rose 18.6% against the same period in 2025; value rose 127%. Bigger and more expensive offices came to market, not simply more offices.

Since the 2020 trough the median price per square foot has almost quadrupled. It is the recovery of the segment the city hit hardest that year, now running at an occupancy that leaves almost nothing empty.

The entry ticket is lower than most people assume

The idea that a Dubai office is necessarily a multi-million investment does not survive contact with the data. Six out of ten deals in 2026 closed below AED 3 million, and the busiest band sits between AED 1 million and AED 2 million. Smaller floorplates, between 400 and 1,000 sq ft, are this market's daily bread: professional practices, consultancies, representative offices.

Two halves of one market: new build and completed

This is what actually changes a purchase decision. In 2026 an office bought off-plan has a median of 3,444 AED/sq ft, a completed one 1,802. Two years ago the ratio was reversed: new build sat at 1,066 and completed at 1,320, and off-plan was barely 6% of transactions. Today it is 64%.

Business Bay is the textbook case, because both halves live in the same district and in almost the same numbers: 627 off-plan deals at a median of 4,881 AED/sq ft and 598 completed ones at 2,038. One district, two prices that never meet. The reason is readable: what sells new in Business Bay today are Grade A towers on the canal, with open floorplates and ceiling heights the early-2000s stock simply does not have.

• New build buys product and time: large open floorplates, generous heights, current building services, and a payment plan that spreads the outlay across the construction years.
• Completed stock buys entry and income: you come in at roughly half the price per square foot, you can inspect before signing and, if it is already let, it pays rent from month one.
• Near-new, meaning towers delivered two or three years ago, is where both advantages meet, and it remains the least crowded part of the market.

The reasoning about a tower's vintage applies here too, with one difference: in residential the weight sits on amenities and brand, in offices it sits on floorplate depth, clear height and available power, because those are what decide which company can move in at all.

Where Dubai offices actually trade

Two warnings on reading that table. Al Sufouh shows a high median because its 557 deals are effectively a single launch: when a new project opens sales, it carries its district's median on its own. And concentration is the rule, not the exception: 69% of 2026 off-plan office deals closed on ten projects out of sixty active ones. In a market like that the district tells you little and the individual building tells you almost everything.

One case inside the registry, and a district half an hour away

O1NE District is the AED 6 billion masterplan AVENEW Development and KORA Properties unveiled on 8 July 2026 in Motor City, next to the Autodrome: six commercial towers, a retail destination and a healthcare facility. Dawn is the first tower, seventy Grade A offices. The DLD registry has already recorded 67 of them between 31 August and 12 October 2026, from 1,963 to 5,479 sq ft, from AED 5,005,000 to AED 12,438,000, averaging 2,440 AED/sq ft. The offices hand over as shell and core, ready to be configured around whoever occupies them, with completion announced for the first quarter of 2030 and a plan that splits the price evenly between construction and handover.

The useful comparison is with its own neighbourhood: completed offices in Motor City trade at a median of 1,265 AED/sq ft. The new-build premium is therefore 93%, almost exactly the 91% that separates new from completed across Dubai. That is how to read a launch: not whether it costs more than the second-hand stock, which it always does, but whether it costs more or less than the premium the market is currently paying for new.

Half an hour from Business Bay, meanwhile, Sharjah is building its own business district: Arada CBD at Aljada, 4.3 million sq ft of leasable space across forty blocks designed for twenty thousand workers, inside a 24 million sq ft masterplan. Shell and core here too. Sharjah runs two ownership tracks, and in approved projects you buy without a time limit: Arada lets its buyers convert hundred-year usufruct rights into full freehold title, with the approval of the Sharjah Real Estate Registration Department. Some of these offices come with a developer-run management programme and a contractually stated return. That formula deserves a chapter of its own, and it will get one.

The cost lines that change the arithmetic

On commercial property the budget lines are not the residential ones. All of them are manageable, but they belong in the conversation before signing, not after.

• Dubai Land Department registration, 4% of the price, exactly as in residential.
• VAT, which applies to commercial property and not to residential: a cash line to budget for and to run past your own accountant.
• Building service charges, which in office buildings follow a different logic from residential and should be requested in writing before signing.
• Fit-out, when handover is shell and core: the most variable line, and also the most negotiable, because office space is built around the occupier.
• Leasing management, if the office is placed with a developer programme or a third-party operator.

What it yields, according to registered contracts

The EJARI registry publishes commercial leases too, and that is the part almost nobody goes looking at. Over the past twelve months Business Bay recorded 1,959 office lease contracts and Jumeirah Lake Towers 4,996. Put those rents next to the sale prices of completed offices in the same district and you get the gross yield, and these are numbers Dubai residential does not produce.

Two notes on method, because a gross yield without a method is a brochure number. The rent is the median of every contract registered in the district, new lettings and renewals together, so it includes leases that have not moved in years: it is a conservative base, not the best achievable. And the price is the completed stock, the only one comparable to a rent being paid today. Downtown Dubai sits below 5% for the same reason it does in residential: the address is part of the price, and buyers there are paying for it knowingly.

Then there is the direction of travel, which matters more than the level. Here I would rather cite an external source than a calculation of my own: the year-on-year change derived from registered contracts moves too much between extractions to be published, while the level of the rent is stable. CBRE's third-quarter 2026 review puts the Dubai market up 12% year on year with occupancy around 95%, driven by financial services, professional services and technology. A market 95% full today, and the new supply being registered right now delivering between 2028 and 2030: that gap is where anyone buying at this moment is operating.

This also settles the choice between new build and completed stock. An office bought off-plan today in Business Bay at 4,881 AED/sq ft, let at today's rents, would yield 3.2% gross. But it is not let today: it is let at handover, at rents that will have moved, and on a Grade A product the district median does not represent. Completed stock, by contrast, delivers its 8.5% now. These are two different jobs: new build works on value at handover and on the leverage of the payment plan, completed stock on immediate income. Knowing which of the two you are doing is half the work.

The figures on this page are fixed to the day I wrote it. The live ones, refreshed weekly from the registry and extended to retail as well, sit in the Dubai commercial property section, with detail on Business Bay and Jumeirah Lake Towers.