Dubai's Supply Wave: 162,500 Homes Scheduled for 2027 and Where the Off-Plan Risk Sits

Cavendish Maxwell counts 24,800 completions in the first half of 2026, split 18,900 apartments and 5,900 villas and townhouses, up 37.6% on the first half of 2025. CBRE counts about 18,000 for the same period and ValuStrat about 20,000. The gap is definitional: each firm decides differently when a tower counts as handed over, and none of them has access to a single official completions register. Buyers should take the range, 18,000 to 25,000 in six months, and not the headline.

The second-half schedule is 47,000 units, 82.5% of them apartments. Cavendish itself expects 14,000 to 23,500 of those to arrive before year end, which is a materialisation rate of 30% to 50%. Knight Frank measured 2025 at 39,700 completions against the schedule, a 64% rate, and 2024 at 50%. The long-run average delivery in Dubai is about 36,000 homes a year. In both 2024 and 2025 the schedule was roughly double that average, and both years the outturn landed closer to the average than to the schedule.

Cavendish quoted 146,400 for 2027 in its first-quarter report and 162,500 in its half-year report, and Knight Frank forecast more than 160,000 units for 2026 alone in February. Khaleej Times quoted roughly 55,000 for 2026 and 75,000 for 2027 in the same month. They differ by a factor of two or three. It depends on whether a firm counts launched, permitted, under construction or likely.

The ValuStrat index rose almost 60% between 2022 and the first quarter of 2025 on Fitch's count. It kept rising for another year. The turn came in March 2026, the month Dubai's population fell by 61,000 at the height of the Iran war, and the index dropped 6% in that single month. The declines then shrank each month, to 1% by June. The population had recovered to 4.74 million by the end of June, up 157,000 for the year, and the June transaction data showed ready-home sales up 46.8% on May.

Cavendish Maxwell has the average sale price at AED 1,639 per square foot in June, down 2.6% on the quarter and up 1.9% on the year. Gross yields sit around 7% for apartments and 5% for villas. Rents are where the indices disagree most: CBRE has second-quarter rents down 6.2% on the quarter and 2.6% on the year, Cavendish has them up 7.8% on the year, ValuStrat has apartments up 1.3% and villas up 2.2%. The sign of the rent number depends on which index you read.

The Dubai Land Department recorded AED 419.94 billion of transactions across 112,850 deals in the first half of 2026. Sales alone were AED 286.44 billion over 86,000 deals, of which 58,840 were off-plan. Betterhomes' second-quarter count is the one that shows the shape of the market: 34,850 residential deals, down 31% on a year earlier, worth AED 84.9 billion, down 45%. Inside that, resales fell 59% to 8,512 while off-plan fell 12% to 26,338. Off-plan was 76% of activity.

That split matters more than the headline decline. Secondary sellers are the ones who set the price when a market turns, and they have stopped transacting. Developers are still selling because they control the payment plan, and a deposit with the balance spread over construction is a cheaper way to hold a Dubai position than a mortgage at current rates. The buyer of an off-plan studio in Jumeirah Village Circle today is competing with the 2027 handover schedule for the same building.

The funding mix is the other quiet change. Provident's reading of Land Department data has cash at 64% of May 2026 purchases and mortgages at 36%, and Cavendish counted 22,500 mortgage transactions worth AED 51.3 billion in the first half. Knight Frank had cash at 86% of volume for the first nine months of 2025. The denominators differ, but the direction is the same: more mortgage-funded, and more dependent on off-plan.

About 45% of the homes under construction in Dubai sit in five districts: Jumeirah Village Circle and Triangle, Dubai South, Mohammed Bin Rashid City, Business Bay and Dubailand Residence Complex. Roughly 66% of the pipeline is studios and one-bedroom units. Apartments are 86% of what is coming against 80% of what exists. Dubai South alone recorded 7,306 off-plan apartment sales in the first half of 2026, the most of any district.

The submarket data already shows the split that Moody's predicted a year ago. On ValuStrat's numbers to June 2026, apartments around Burj Khalifa are down 16.7% on the year, Jumeirah Beach Residence down 13% and Town Square down 5.7%, and among villas Mudon is down 5%, Victory Heights down 4% and International City down 3.2%. Against that, DIFC apartments are up 8.1%, Dubai Sports City up 6.6% and Silicon Oasis up 6.4%. Villas on Jumeirah Islands are up 17.9%, Emirates Hills up 10.7% and The Meadows up 10%. Betterhomes has Palm Jumeirah Garden Homes up 37% per square foot on the year.

Every rising submarket in that table is one where nobody can build more. The falling ones are either a district with a tower cluster still to complete or a resort-style address whose buyers were paying for a view that the next tower will block. The Burj Khalifa area is the one losing value fastest.

Fitch Ratings said on 29 May 2025 that Dubai prices would see a moderate correction from the second half of 2025 into 2026, of no more than 15%, and that the banks and homebuilders it rates could absorb it without downgrades. Its model assumed 120,000 completions in 2026 and 5% annual population growth. Moody's said on 10 September 2025 that more than 150,000 new homes between 2025 and 2027 represented about 20% of the existing stock and would produce a modest correction from 2026, with mid-market apartments most exposed and villas holding up in the near term. S&P Global said in January 2026 that population growth would absorb the supply and that prices would moderate over the following 12 to 24 months rather than fall. UBS placed Dubai in the elevated-risk bracket of its 2025 Global Real Estate Bubble Index, the largest risk increase of any city it covers, noting that building permits were back near 2017 levels, the last year the market turned down.

Sixteen months after the Fitch note, the ValuStrat index has fallen 10% from peak, the Fitch ceiling has not been breached, and the population dip in March was reversed by June. The delivery figures for the first half of 2026 came in between the Moody's and Fitch assumptions. None of the three has been proven wrong yet.

For a cross-border buyer the practical positions are narrow. A completed villa in a district with no remaining land, bought from a motivated resale seller in a quarter when resale volumes are down 59%, is the one trade the data supports. A studio or one-bedroom apartment bought off-plan in any of the five concentration districts for handover in 2027 is the one it does not, because the buyer is paying today's brochure price for delivery into the largest handover year in the city's history. The 2027 schedule of 162,500 units will not all arrive. Enough of it will.