Dubai Land Department makes all real estate data publicly available as it strengthens transparency

The Dubai Land Department has made the landmark move to make all of its real estate data
publicly available on its website.

The full data set was made available this week and it contains everything from sales transactions, gifts, mortgages, Ejari registrations, valuations, land, building and unit data, as well as broker, developer, and projects data.

This includes unique identifiers for each transaction such as property IDs and Ejari contract numbers.

Lynnette Sacchetto, a leading consultant who is recognised as an expert and a thought leader in the UAE’s real estate industry, said: “This is a significant, proactive initiative from the Dubai government, which will continue to strengthen transparency in the real estate market and position Dubai, on par, amongst other mature real estate markets.

“As transparency increases, we will also see investment, including foreign direct investment, increase as well.”

In 2020, the JLL Global Real Estate Transparency Index was released and Dubai climbed up
three spots to the 36th place globally, which placed Dubai as a semi-transparent market and on the ‘cusp on transparency’.

Sacchetto added: “The report credited the city’s improvement to Mo’asher, which is Dubai’s own official house price index. As the next report is set to be released this year, I truly believe that Dubai will move up the ranks and into the transparency category, with the majority of the reason attributed to this landmark move done by the Dubai Land Department this week.”

Dubai Land Department’s decisive moves towards transparency

In 2013, the Dubai Land Department took the first steps to make their sales transaction data
available on their public website. It included parts of the transactions such as transaction date, location name in Arabic and price. Even though it was a limited data set at that time, it was still a very good starting point and something no other city in the region had done before.

“The data became instantly useful, by real estate professionals across the city and used in
various reports and research throughout the region. For the first time, we had credible usable data about Dubai real estate transactions and it brought Dubai closer to international standards in transparency,” Sacchetto explained.

As the years progressed, the Dubai Land Department released various market reports and worked with the private sector to expose the data to the public.

Then in 2019, they released Mo’asher, the first official house price index of the city of Dubai for sales and the rental price performance index was released in January of 2022.

In 2021, the land department partnered with various private entities where they shared their data in return for the private sector to create meaningful products for consumers.

“All of these efforts were done as a way to make transaction data available in the most efficient and responsible manner possible and it was a success,” Sacchetto concluded.