Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai publishes more about its property market than any Gulf neighbour — every sale, lease and valuation, anonymised, behind a CAPTCHA and a personal-use-only licence — and nothing at all about who owns a given tower, so the owners named here are the ones who name themselves in exchange filings.
8 buildings · 6 with an owner established · 18 sources · 7 tier A · 1 tier C · prepared 2026-10-04
Title in Dubai is held in the Real Property Register kept by the Dubai Land Department under Law No. (7) of 2006, and it is not a public register: there is no owner name-search, and the only ownership document DLD issues online is a 'To Whom It May Concern' certificate of the applicant's own property, for AED 50 plus AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation fees. What DLD does publish is unusual for the region: nine 'Open Data' datasets — sales, mortgages and gifts since 2024, Ejari-registered rents, per-procedure valuations, projects and a developer register — each query answered after a CAPTCHA and downloadable as CSV, but every transaction row carries only a count of buyers and sellers, never a name, and the site's terms authorise use 'solely for your personal, noncommercial use'. Who may own at all is set by Article 4 of the 2006 law: ownership is restricted to UAE and GCC nationals, companies fully owned by them and public joint stock companies, except that in areas determined by the Ruler non-UAE nationals may hold freehold without time limit or usufruct and leasehold up to 99 years. Regulation No. (3) of 2006 lists those areas plot by plot — Palm Jumeirah, Dubai Marina, Emirates Hills, Burj Khalifa district, Jumeirah Lakes Towers and eighteen others — and DLD's maps have since extended the list.
- dubailand.gov.ae — “Land Department (referred to as "we," or "us") authorizes you to view this Web Site and to download or print portions of the materials on this Web Site, including text, graphics, images and other content (collectively, the "Web Site Materials"), solely for your personal, noncommercial use. ... Unless otherwise expressly set forth in a written agreement between you and Land Department, you may not sell or modify the Web Site Materials or reproduce, display, publicly perform, distribute or otherwise use the Web Site Materials other than for your personal, noncommercial use.”
The marquee buildings
The towers that set the tone of the core, and who holds them. A price is the price a document states, on the date it states — not an estimate of what the building is worth now.
| Building | Use | Owner | Owner type | Last price paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burj Khalifa 1 Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Boulevard, Downtown Dubai |
Mixed use | Emaar Properties PJSC Emaar's Integrated Annual Report 2025 names Burj Khalifa and Dubai Mall as 'two of our flagship assets' (both LEED Platinum, the mall's confirmed January 2026). Emaar is DFM-listed; its shareholders of 5% or more at 31 December 2025 are Investment Corporation of Dubai, 1,968,605,691 shares (22.272%), and EITL DIFC SPC 1 LTD, 659,050,967 shares (7.456%). The report does not say which components of the tower Emaar retains; residences and offices in it were sold off-plan, and the closed register cannot be asked. No price is stated. |
Public company | —A |
| The Dubai Mall Financial Centre Road, Downtown Dubai 4.9 million sq ft GLA |
Retail | Emaar Properties PJSC Emaar's 2025 annual report: 'Dubai Mall, the world's most visited shopping destination and part of Downtown Dubai, spans 4.9 million sq ft GLA with 99.6% occupancy ... It is undergoing a 1.5 billion dirham expansion that will add 240 new outlets.' Held through Emaar Malls, which the same report says recorded revenue of approximately AED 5.8 billion with average occupancy above 98%. Emaar Malls was a separately listed company until Emaar absorbed it; the report now treats it as a segment. No acquisition price exists — Emaar built it. |
Public company | —A |
| Uptown Tower Uptown Dubai, Jumeirah Lakes Towers |
Mixed use | DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre Authority) DMCC's own property-portfolio page: 'Uptown Tower, the first of two supertall structures in DMCC's Uptown Dubai district, rises 340 meters with 81 storeys', with 'premium commercial, residential, and leisure spaces' and the SO/ Uptown Dubai hotel; Uptown Dubai is described as 'the newest jewel in our property portfolio'. DMCC is a Government of Dubai authority and the free-zone master developer. The page lets the office space directly. No price is stated. |
Government | —A |
| Almas Tower Jumeirah Lakes Towers |
Office | DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre Authority) DMCC's property-portfolio page offers 'our premium offices located on Level 49 of the iconic Almas Tower in Jumeirah Lakes Towers ... from 88.26 to 323.46 square feet, with annual rents starting at just AED 78,000', houses its Luxury Innovation Centre on the 48th floor, and counts the tower among JLT's '87 state-of-the-art residential and commercial towers'. The page is a letting page, not a title statement: it establishes that DMCC holds and lets floors in the tower, not that it holds every floor — JLT offices are also sold freehold, and the register is closed. |
Government | —A |
| Index Tower Dubai International Financial Centre |
Mixed use | Emirates REIT (CEIC) PLC Emirates REIT, listed on Nasdaq Dubai since 8 April 2014 and managed by Equitativa (Dubai) Limited, lists Index Tower and Index Mall among its seven properties (net leasable area 166,320 sq m, portfolio value USD 1,235.1 million as stated on its site) and gives its own address as Level 23, Index Tower, DIFC. The page does not state which floors of the tower the REIT holds; Index Tower is a strata building with residences sold separately, so the REIT's interest is a portion, not the whole. |
REIT | —A |
| Mall of the Emirates Sheikh Zayed Road, Al Barsha 1 245,000 m² GLA |
Retail | Majid Al Futtaim Properties LLC Majid Al Futtaim's September 2026 investor presentation lists Mall of the Emirates first in Majid Al Futtaim Properties' shopping-malls portfolio: 'Opened: 2005, 245k m2 GLA, Occupancy Rate: 100%', with 'Mall of the Emirates 3.0' redevelopment phased into H2 2026. The group describes itself as the 'highest rated privately owned corporate in the GCC' and publishes because it issues listed sukuk and bonds; the presentation names the company, not the family, as the owner. No price exists — the group built it. |
Private company | —A |
| Burj Al Arab Jumeirah Street, Umm Suqeim 3 |
Hotel | Not established the jurisdiction does not disclose owners Dubai Holding's hospitality page names 'Jumeirah Burj Al Arab' first among 'Jumeirah's Flagship Projects' and calls Jumeirah 'our homegrown luxury brand', but its language throughout is that Jumeirah 'operates an exceptional portfolio of local and international properties'. Management is not ownership, the group is unlisted and files nothing, and the register is closed, so the title-holder is left blank rather than inferred from the brand. |
Not established | —A |
| ICD Brookfield Place Al Mustaqbal Street, Dubai International Financial Centre |
Office | Not established the source would not open The tower's own site is a retail and events page with no ownership statement; the Investment Corporation of Dubai's site returns a Cloudflare challenge on every path; and a full-text search of SEC EDGAR for the building's name returns only 13F filings by DIFC-based funds using it as their address, not a Brookfield property schedule. The name encodes a joint venture, but no document opened here states the parties or their stakes, so the owner is blank. |
Not established | —C |
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
Dubai has no assessment roll — DLD's Valuations dataset is per-procedure, keyed to no parcel — and its register is closed, so the city's 'most valuable ground' can only be measured through the companies that publish. What they publish is large: the figures below are from Emaar's audited 2025 report, Dubai Holding's sector page and Majid Al Futtaim's investor presentation.
Who builds the houses
New-home building in this market: the volume, and the firms behind it. Ownership of a builder matters as much as its volume — a private-equity platform and a family firm behave differently.
Dubai is a developer-led off-plan market: homes are sold from master plans into escrow accounts regulated by DLD, and the two largest developers are a DFM-listed company 22% held by the state and the state's own holding company. DLD's Project and Developer datasets would yield a defensible units-delivered league table — unit counts, percent complete and escrow account per project — but each query sits behind a CAPTCHA and the licence forbids redistribution, so the figures below are the developers' own.
| Name | Type | Units, as the developer states them |
|---|---|---|
| Emaar Properties PJSC Integrated Annual Report 2025: UAE development property sales AED 71.1bn in 2025, group AED 80.4bn; land bank ~344 million sq ft; Investment Corporation of Dubai holds 22.272%. |
Public company | 125,600+ delivered since inception; 13,500+ under constructionA |
| Dubai Holding (Meraas, Nakheel, Dubai Properties) Dubai Holding's real-estate sector page: 'one of the emirate's largest landowners and leading integrated master developers', ~1.6 million people living in its communities, with Meraas, Nakheel and Dubai Properties as its master developers and a land-portfolio arm, Dubai Holding Land Estates. |
Sovereign fund | 106.7K+ residential and land plots deliveredA |
| Nakheel Nakheel's own page: 'a member of Dubai Holding, is a world-leading master developer' whose waterfront projects 'including the world-famous, award-winning Palm Jumeirah, have added more than 300 kilometres' to Dubai's coastline. Unit counts are not published on the page. |
Sovereign fund | 300+ km of coastline added (Palm Jumeirah, Palm Jebel Ali)A |
| Dubai Residential REIT The landlord rather than the builder: DFM-listed in 2025 within Dubai Holding, Shariah-compliant, 22+ communities, per Dubai Holding's sector page. |
REIT | 35,900+ homes owned and operatedA |
| Sobha Realty Private; its about page says Sobha Group was founded in 1976 and is 'a multinational, multiproduct group with developments and investments in the UAE, India, and UK'. Its 'Square Feet of Land Area Developed' and 'Market Share in Dubai' tiles are JavaScript counters that render empty to a script, so no number is asserted. |
Private company | not stated in readable formA |
| DMCC (freehold plots, Jumeirah Lakes Towers and Uptown Dubai) A land seller as much as a builder: DMCC's page invites buyers to 'purchase your own plot of land in the bustling heart of DMCC', and JLT is one of the designated freehold areas of Regulation No. (3) of 2006. |
Government | 87 towers in JLTA |
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
With the register closed, the commercial ownership record of Dubai is what its listed and bond-issuing landlords disclose. Their bases differ — Emaar and DMCC count assets and square feet, Majid Al Futtaim square metres, the two REITs US dollars — so this is a set of self-descriptions, not a ranking. The large government landlords that do not issue securities (DIFC Authority, Dubai Holding Asset Management, ICD) publish no floor area.
| Name | Type | Portfolio, as the owner states it |
|---|---|---|
| Emaar Properties PJSC (Emaar Malls, Emaar Hospitality) Integrated Annual Report 2025. Emaar Malls revenue approximately AED 5.8bn, occupancy above 98%; three hotels with over 750 keys added in 2025. |
Public company | Dubai Mall 4.9M sq ft + Dubai Hills Mall ~2M sq ft GLA; 41 hotels, 10,012 keysA |
| Majid Al Futtaim Properties LLC September 2026 investor presentation: 238 million mall visitors in 2025; Dubai assets include Mall of the Emirates (245k m²), City Centre Mirdif (193k m²), City Centre Deira (116k m²) and City Centre Me'aisem (22k m²). The group disposed of its UAE detached-hotel portfolio in H1 2024. |
Private company | 29 malls, 1.8M+ m² GLA in 5 countriesA |
| DMCC Property-portfolio page: Jumeirah Lakes Towers 'houses more than 100,000 residents and visitors'; Uptown Dubai adds Uptown Tower (340 m, 81 storeys) and a second supertall; 26,000+ member businesses. |
Government | 87 residential and commercial towers, 600+ retail outlets (JLT)A |
| Emirates REIT (CEIC) PLC Nasdaq Dubai; Index Tower, Index Mall, Loft Offices, Building 24, European Business Centre and three schools; 'approximately USD 1.1 billion in assets under management'. Sold Office Park Building in October 2024. |
REIT | 7 properties, 166,320 sq m NLA, USD 1,235.1M portfolio valueA |
| ENBD REIT (CEIC) Limited Nasdaq Dubai, DFSA-regulated, managed by Emirates NBD Asset Management; 'eleven properties, located in Dubai in the office, residential and alternative sectors'. The property list itself renders behind a 'Load More' script. |
REIT | 11 properties, USD 434M portfolio value (30 Jun 2026)A |
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- The current list of designated foreign-ownership areas. Regulation No. (3) of 2006 is the base instrument and names 23 areas with plot numbers; DLD's open data flags each row 'Is Free Hold?' but the current map is not published as a dataset and later regulations were not opened.
- Dubai Land Department Annual Report 2024 (28 October 2025, 7 MB PDF) — the page opened but the PDF link is a script; aggregate 2024 transaction totals were therefore not read from it.
- Everything in the Dubai Pulse archive, which DLD names as the home of prior-year data: the host never completes a TCP connection from outside the GCC.
- The owners of Emirates Towers and ICD Brookfield Place, and the title-holder of Burj Al Arab — no filing or opened page states them.
- Which floors of Almas Tower and Index Tower DMCC and Emirates REIT respectively hold: both pages establish an interest, neither states its extent.
- Property Finder's and Bayut's terms of use (the former returned HTTP 500 to the scout, the latter a bot wall) — treated as prohibiting scraping; no listing data was taken.
- Unit counts for the private developers (Sobha Realty, Binghatti, Danube, Damac, Azizi): their sites render figures as JavaScript counters or refuse scripts.
Sources
- Open Data — Real Estate Data (Transactions, Rents, Valuations, Land, Building, Unit, Project, Developer, Broker) — Dubai Land Department · openA
- Terms & Conditions — Dubai Land Department · openA
- Law No. (7) of 2006 Concerning Real Property Registration in the Emirate of Dubai (Article 4) — Government of Dubai Legal Affairs Department — Dubai Legislation Portal · openA
- Regulation No. (3) of 2006 Determining Areas for Ownership by Non-UAE Nationals of Real Property in the Emirate of Dubai — Government of Dubai Legal Affairs Department — Dubai Legislation Portal · openA
- To Whom It May Concern Certificate (certificate of property ownership statement) — service fees — Dubai Land Department · registrationA
- Integrated Annual Report 2025 (performance review, Emaar Malls, hospitality, corporate governance report with 5%+ shareholders at 31 Dec 2025) — Emaar Properties PJSC (DFM: EMAAR) · openA
- Real Estate sector — Meraas, Nakheel, Dubai Properties, Dubai Residential REIT — Dubai Holding · openA
- Property portfolio — Jumeirah Lakes Towers and Uptown Dubai — DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre Authority) · openA
- Emirates REIT — portfolio overview — Emirates REIT (CEIC) PLC, managed by Equitativa (Dubai) Limited; Nasdaq Dubai · openA
- Portfolio and performance highlights — ENBD REIT (CEIC) Limited; Nasdaq Dubai · openA
- Investor Presentation, September 2026 (Majid Al Futtaim Properties — shopping malls portfolio) — Majid Al Futtaim Holding LLC · openA
- Hospitality sector — Jumeirah and its flagship projects — Dubai Holding · openA
- Dubai Pulse — Dubai Land Department organisation datasets (unreachable) — Digital Dubai · blockedC
- Dubai Statistics Center / data.dubai (bot wall) — Digital Dubai · blockedC
- Investment Corporation of Dubai — portfolio (Cloudflare challenge) — Investment Corporation of Dubai · blockedC
- Who we are — a member of Dubai Holding — Nakheel · openA
- Dubai Land Department Annual Report 2024 (page; PDF link is script-rendered) — Dubai Land Department · openA
- About Sobha Realty — Sobha Realty · openA