What You Pay Beyond the Price in Dubai

A Dubai property is quoted as one number and bought with several. None of the others is hidden — every one is published by somebody — but they are published in different places, which amounts to the same thing for a buyer seeing them for the first time. Here they are together.

At Transfer, Once

The Dubai Land Department charges a registration fee of 4% of the purchase price. It is paid once, at transfer, and every party in the market knows the figure before anyone starts, which makes it the one cost you can plan around exactly.

Alongside it sit the smaller registration and administration charges — the Oqood registration on an off-plan purchase, the title deed issuance at handover, and the developer's No Objection Certificate where one is required. These are modest against the transfer fee, but they are not zero and they are not usually quoted in a brochure.

Every Year, Afterwards

The service charge is the recurring one. It is levied per square foot of your unit and it funds the shared parts: the pool and its plant, the gym, the lifts and their maintenance contract, lobby and podium lighting, landscaping, cleaning, security, insurance and a reserve fund against large future repairs. Rates are set per project and revised, so the only useful number is the current one for the project you are buying in — ask for it in writing, and ask what it was two years ago.

Cooling is billed separately and it is the line most often missed. Where a project is on district cooling, the supply is piped from a central plant and charged by a utility that is not DEWA, sometimes with a fixed capacity charge whether you use it or not. Ask which arrangement a project is on before you buy, because it is not something you can change afterwards.

The Two Nobody Quotes

First, the cost of an empty home. On a post-handover payment plan you are paying instalments on a property you already hold, which means you can live in it or let it while you pay — that is the point of the structure. On a plan that completes at handover, everything falls due before you can do either.

Second, the cost of a date that moves. A completion date in a Sale and Purchase Agreement is a promise with a remedy attached, and the remedy is written in the contract rather than in the brochure. Read that clause before you read the specification. Ask what happened the last time the developer's own date moved, and ask for the completed projects by name with the quarter each was promised for and the month keys were handed over.

Our answer to that last question is one project: Floareá Residence in Arjan, launched September 2023, 206 homes, handed over and occupied. Five more are under construction and none has been delivered yet. That is the whole record and it is on the delivery ledger rather than left for you to assemble.