What a transaction record contains
- Date: when the transaction was registered, which determines which period it falls into.
- Location: the community and, where available, the specific building or project.
- Property characteristics: property type, recorded area and typically the bedroom count.
- Recorded price: the value the transaction was registered at.
- Derived AED/sqft: recorded price divided by recorded area.
- Transaction type: in particular, whether the sale is off-plan or ready property.
How to research the sales history of a property
Work from the narrowest geography outward. Start with the specific building; filter to the same property type and a comparable unit size band; then set a period that is recent enough to be relevant but long enough to contain a usable number of records.
If that produces too few results, widen one dimension at a time and keep track of what you widened. Widening the period keeps the property comparison tight. Widening the size band keeps the location tight. Widening to the whole community loosens both — sometimes necessary, but worth knowing you have done.
A sales history assembled this way is defensible because the reasoning is explicit. One assembled by applying broad filters and reporting whatever came back is not.
Interpreting transaction types
Off-plan and ready-property transactions are both genuine sales, but they are not interchangeable evidence. An off-plan sale prices a future product on a payment plan; a ready-property sale prices existing stock available now. Using one to value the other introduces an error you cannot quantify.
For the same reason, the proportion of activity that is off-plan — the off-plan share — is a useful market signal in its own right. It describes the mix of recorded activity, not the proportion of built stock.
Limits you should know about
- Recorded prices reflect registered transaction values and may not capture every commercial term agreed between the parties.
- Reporting lag means the most recent weeks are incomplete and will revise upward. Never read the current month as a finished data point.
- Recorded area definitions can vary, which affects AED/sqft comparability across differently recorded properties.
- Transaction records do not describe condition, floor, view or finish — all of which affect price and none of which are in the data.