UAE Property Analyzer

Going through Abu Dhabi's registrations, I noticed the same price showing up twice: a developer sale from a few years ago and a recent "resale", identical to the dirham. That turns out to be a way to see what off-plan buyers paid and what their homes are worth now.

A Third of "Resales" Are Contract Prices About 2.5 Years Old

In the last 12 months (registrations from 20 October 2025 to 16 October 2026), Abu Dhabi recorded 7,030 resales (secondary sales, court-ordered sales excluded). 2,188 of them (31%) had odd prices, not a multiple of AED 5,000. I matched those prices against earlier developer (primary) sales in the same project.

Almost seven in ten odd-priced "resales" carry exactly the price of a developer sale in the same project, a median of about 2.5 years earlier. At handover or on a transfer, the off-plan contract price is registered again as a "resale". What I found at Radiant Square happens across the emirate.

Contract Price vs Today's Market

I treated each match as the original contract and compared it with today's resale market: the median price per m² of round-priced resales in the same project and bedroom type over the last 12 months (at least 5). That gave 961 comparisons, with a median contract date of October 2023.

54% beat the market: close to a coin toss. The spread is wide: the middle half of gains runs from +17% to +44%.

The Project Makes the Difference

Projects with at least 20 comparisons:

Radiant Square and Saadiyat Grove beat the market by a wide margin; the two Al Shamkha projects and Gardenia Bay made about half of it. By type, studios (+38% vs +26%) and 2BR (+34% vs +25%) did well and 4BR did poorly (+16% vs +29%). That also compares different projects, though: only a handful of projects let me compare unit types within the same building, so I cannot say the type itself made the difference (in Dubai, within the same project it made almost none).

Limits of These Numbers

• Unit numbers are not published, so this does not follow the same flat. It compares a contract at the same price with today's market for the same project and bedroom type.
• A price match can be a coincidence: 13% of round-priced resales also match an earlier developer sale.
• These are gains in price per m², before the 2% registration fee and agency fees. After fees, the average buyer slightly trails the market.

My Takeaway

When I followed Dubai's off-plan projects, the median gain was +13% against +19% for the market over the same years. Abu Dhabi is the same story: on average, off-plan buyers rode the market. Beating it comes down to the project and the unit type. Whenever you see an off-plan "track record", put it next to what the whole market did over the same years.