Buy before it is built

You are buying a property that is not built yet, directly from the developer or from someone reselling their contract before handover. You sign a sale agreement, pay a deposit, and then pay the balance in instalments tied to construction milestones or to fixed dates, with a final payment at handover. Until the building is completed and the title deed issued, what you own is a registered contractual interest in the unit rather than a finished home. That is a different asset from a completed property, and it should be judged differently.

A project escrow account. A developer selling off-plan in Dubai has to register the project with the regulator and pay buyer instalments into an escrow account tied to that project, so money is released against construction progress rather than into the developer's general working capital. Your purchase is also recorded on the Land Department's interim register, which is what makes your interest a matter of record before a title deed exists. What none of that protects against is delay, a specification that quietly changes, or a handover market weaker than the launch market. Those are questions about the developer's track record, not about the paperwork.

A ready property can be inspected, valued against a real neighbouring sale, mortgaged conventionally and either lived in or rented out from the day you own it. An off-plan property cannot be inspected, is valued against the developer's own price list and comparable launches rather than completed sales, and produces no rent until it is handed over. In exchange you spread the payments over the construction period instead of funding the whole purchase at once. Which is better depends entirely on whether you need the property to be doing something for you in the meantime.

Sometimes, and on different terms from a completed home. Fewer lenders offer it, they generally lend only on projects they have approved, and the loan is usually released in stages against construction rather than in full at the start. Until then the payment plan is the finance, and it is an obligation rather than an option. Assume you are funding the instalments yourself and treat mortgage availability as a bonus rather than the plan, and confirm the current position with a lender before you commit, because appetite for off-plan lending moves with the market.

Miss instalments and the developer can begin a termination process, which in Dubai runs through the regulator rather than being at the developer's sole discretion. How much you get back depends on how far the construction has progressed and on the contract, and it can be a substantial deduction from what you have already paid rather than a clean refund. This is the single most common way an off-plan purchase goes wrong, and it is entirely avoidable: work out whether you can service the whole plan from money you will actually have, not from a resale you are assuming will happen first.

Usually yes, and it is common enough that it has its own name here: assignment, or resale before handover. Most of the off-plan listings on this page are exactly that. What you need to check first is the developer's own condition, since many require a minimum percentage of the price to be paid before they will permit a transfer, and there is normally a transfer fee payable to the developer on top of the government fee. Whether you can sell at a profit is a separate question from whether you are allowed to sell, and depends on what else is completing in the same community at the same time.

The Dubai Land Department transfer fee of 4% plus an admin charge applies to off-plan just as it does to a completed sale, and on a new launch it is normally paid early rather than at handover. Registering the purchase on the interim register carries its own fee. Then budget for what arrives after the keys: the developer's handover charges, service charges from the day the building is handed over whether or not you have moved in or found a tenant, and the cost of making the property rentable if that is the plan. The service charge is the figure most often left out of a projection and the one that varies most between buildings.

That depends on the specific project and the price, and anyone answering it with a yes has not looked at either. The way to judge it is to work out what the unit has to be worth at handover to beat simply buying something completed today and renting it out, then ask how likely that is given what else is being built in the same community and what the developer has delivered before. We will run that calculation with you on any project on this page, including when it says the launch is not worth the wait.