Majority of investors expect Dubai property prices to rise in 2026

Stake, an investment platform operating in Dubai, has released the first prediction market of its kind in the region. Five thousand investors were surveyed. The result: 69 % expect property prices in Dubai to rise. Nearly half, 49 %, expect transaction volumes to exceed those of the first quarter, a quarter that already set one of the highest benchmarks in the market's history. The underlying figures support the sentiment. Dubai's transactions rose 31 % in Q1 to AED 252 billion, and that was achieved during a regional war. Luxury real estate investment climbed 26 % to AED 87.71 billion. Ready-home transactions jumped 46.8 % month on month, the strongest monthly increase in three years. Off-plan rose 32 % month on month and now accounts for 75 % of all residential sales. There is a second layer to the data, and it is the one worth reading carefully. Measured year on year, ready-homes are down 23 % and off-plan is down 16 %.

Objectively and logically, the direction of prices is not difficult to reason through. Across the entire world, everything is becoming more expensive. Supply chain costs are rising. Material costs are rising. Inflation is not a Dubai problem, it is a global one. And in a city building at this scale, every one of those cost increases eventually finds its way into the price of a finished property. Which means the investor who understood the timing has already secured their position before the cost curve caught up with the market. Timing has always been the decisive factor in Dubai, and right now we are sitting in a healthy buyer's market. And yet, even in this window, launches are still selling out within hours. That tells you everything about where the demand actually sits. The rest of the world is inflating. Dubai is building through it. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is where the return lives.

Now look at that year on year figure again, because this is where most international investors will draw exactly the wrong conclusion. Ready-homes down 23 %. Off-plan down 16 %. Read in isolation, that sounds like a market losing altitude. It is not. It is a market being measured against 2025, the single strongest year Dubai has ever recorded. Falling short of an all-time record is not a decline. It is a comparison against a peak, and a peak by definition is not a baseline. And within that same period, a large scale geopolitical conflict broke out across the region. Many reacted to panic rather than to the full picture. They saw the headline and moved for the exit. What the numbers now show is that the market absorbed a war, recovered its momentum within weeks, and returned to growth. If anything should settle an investor's concerns, it is precisely that. To this day I still see hesitation among new investors, a certain uncertainty about the market. That is human, and I understand it. But every crisis in history has been survivable, and after every crisis, the ones who moved with conviction have taken the largest share of the profit. That is not a Dubai phenomenon. That is a global constant, and it has been true for as long as markets have existed. Being contrarian in a crisis requires courage. But when you compare the UAE to how other markets handled the same period, I would argue the rest of the world has something to learn here, not the other way around. The Emirates did not merely survive the disruption. They demonstrated that the systems underneath continue to function under pressure, and that is the only real test a market ever faces.

Sentiment tells you what investors feel. Numbers tell you what the market did. And in Dubai, for the first half of 2026, both are pointing in the same direction. Confidence is not the reason to invest here. It is the consequence of a market that keeps proving, crisis after crisis, that it was built to withstand exactly this. The question was never whether Dubai would recover. It was who would still be standing there when it did.