| Year | Deals | Avg ticket, AED | Mortgage share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2,381 | 1,188,176 | 27.9% |
| 2016 | 1,644 | 1,043,641 | 36.9% |
| 2017 | 1,549 | 1,000,000 | 34.6% |
| 2018 | 1,217 | 828,100 | 39.4% |
| 2019 | 1,319 | 700,000 | 23.9% |
| 2020 | 912 | 631,680 | 28.1% |
| 2021 | 1,776 | 720,040 | 19.6% |
| 2022 | 2,223 | 837,400 | 20.4% |
| 2023 | 2,780 | 1,007,450 | 12.1% |
| 2024 | 2,958 | 1,315,892 | 15.2% |
| 2025 | 4,560 | 1,798,414 | 13.8% |
| 2026 | 3,093 | 2,561,280 | 12.0% |
In 2018, 39.4% of Dubai office purchases involved a registered mortgage — roughly two in every five deals. By 2026, that share has fallen to 12.0%, close to one in eight. Read on its own, that looks like a market getting harder to finance. Read alongside two other numbers from the same twelve years — deal volume and average ticket size — it reads as something closer to the opposite: a market where the buyer base has shifted toward people who don't need financing at all.
The decline isn't a straight line — but the direction hasn't reversed since 2018
Mortgage share bounced around in the mid-to-high 20s and 30s from 2015 to 2020 — 27.9% in 2015, up to 39.4% at the 2018 peak, then down to 23.9% in 2019 as the broader market slowed. It fell sharply after 2020: 19.6% in 2021, 20.4% in 2022, then a step down to 12.1% in 2023 — a level it has essentially held ever since, at 15.2% (2024), 13.8% (2025) and 12.0% (2026 YTD). Whatever drove the 2018-2023 shift, it hasn't reversed in three full years since.
View as table
| Year | Mortgage share |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 27.9% |
| 2016 | 36.9% |
| 2017 | 34.6% |
| 2018 | 39.4% |
| 2019 | 23.9% |
| 2020 | 28.1% |
| 2021 | 19.6% |
| 2022 | 20.4% |
| 2023 | 12.1% |
| 2024 | 15.2% |
| 2025 | 13.8% |
| 2026 | 12.0% |
What moved alongside it: bigger checks, more of them
The average office transaction was AED 631,680 in 2020. By 2026 it's AED 2,561,280 — roughly four times larger. And this wasn't a smaller number of larger deals; deal volume rose over the same stretch too, from 912 transactions in 2020 to an annualized pace above 5,000 in 2026. A market where the typical deal has gotten this much bigger, and there are more of them, is a market where the buyer base has shifted toward investors and institutions writing larger checks outright, rather than owner-occupiers financing a purchase against income.
Why cash, structurally
Cash removes financing risk and timeline entirely, which matters more as check sizes climb and as sellers increasingly favor speed and certainty of close — a cash buyer can move on a deal in days, a financed one in weeks. It also matters more in a market with the kind of price volatility we've documented elsewhere on this site: a mortgage approved against one month's valuation can be a mismatch against the next month's, in a market where medians have moved 30-40% month to month (see our price-quadrupling piece for the year-by-year detail). None of that proves causation on its own, but the pattern — bigger, more frequent, less financed — points in one consistent direction.
A market moving away from mortgages isn't a market getting cheaper to enter. It's the opposite — the buyers who remain can write bigger checks without one.— OSNOVA analysis
What this means if you are financing
None of this means mortgage-financed office purchases have disappeared — 12% of a market that did 3,093 deals through August 2026 is still several hundred transactions a year. But a shrinking share means fewer comparable financed deals to benchmark a bank valuation against, and a market increasingly priced by buyers who aren't sensitive to financing costs, appraisal timelines, or loan-to-value limits at all. Worth knowing which kind of buyer you're competing against before making an offer — and worth building extra time into any offer that depends on approval, in a market moving this fast around you.
Fewer financed comparables means benchmarking matters more, not less. We'll check the asking price against DLD-registered sales before you go to the bank.