Imagine a stock exchange where three companies accounted for 87% of every trade. That's roughly the shape Dubai's office market had in 2021 — except the three names were Business Bay, JLT, and whichever district happened to hold the rotating third seat that year. For most of the last decade, those three districts absorbed the overwhelming majority of all office deals; at the 2021 peak, the top three made up 87.3% of every transaction in the market. By 2025 their combined share had dropped to 62.3%. Year-to-date 2026 sits at 60.3%. The market hasn't gotten smaller; it's gotten wider.
View as table
| Year | Top-3 concentration |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 77.0% |
| 2016 | 79.1% |
| 2017 | 80.5% |
| 2018 | 83.9% |
| 2019 | 86.1% |
| 2020 | 85.5% |
| 2021 | 87.3% |
| 2022 | 83.4% |
| 2023 | 82.5% |
| 2024 | 80.4% |
| 2025 | 62.3% |
| 2026 | 60.3% |
A decade of concentration, then a sudden loosening
The concentration ratio climbed steadily from 77.0% in 2015 to 86.1% in 2019, dipped slightly during 2020's disruption (85.5%), then hit its peak in 2021 at 87.3% — a year when trading was thin enough that the handful of liquid districts absorbed almost everything else by default. From there it held in the low-to-mid 80s through 2024 (80.4%). The real break comes in 2025, an 18.1-point drop to 62.3% in a single year, holding at a similar level through 2026 year-to-date.
The two constants and the rotating seat
Business Bay and JLT are the fixed points across all twelve years — every top-three list includes both. Watching their price trajectories against Arjan, one of the districts that has periodically taken the third seat, shows how differently they've each moved even while occupying similar roles in the concentration math:
| District | 2020 | 2026 | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Bay | 728 | 4,230 | ×5.8 |
| JLT | 543 | 1,677 | ×3.1 |
| Arjan | 657 | 1,554 | ×2.4 |
Business Bay's price roughly quintupled from 2020 to 2026, JLT roughly tripled, and Arjan — despite far thinner liquidity — still managed to more than double from its 2020 base. All three remained part of the market's core even as the overall concentration ratio fell, which tells you the drop in concentration isn't about Business Bay or JLT losing relevance. It's about what's happening below them.
Business Bay and JLT haven't lost their grip on the market. Everything below them has gotten more crowded.— OSNOVA analysis
Why a falling concentration ratio matters more than it sounds
A market where 87% of deals sit in three districts is a market where price discovery outside those three is thin and unreliable — asking prices in a district with a handful of annual transactions are much easier to misquote, in either direction, simply because there isn't enough trading history to check them against. At 60%, there's meaningfully more liquidity, and more reliable comparables, spread across a wider set of districts than there was even three years ago. That's a structural change worth knowing about before assuming "everyone is in Business Bay or JLT" is still the whole story — it's decreasingly the whole story, on this data, every year.
Thinner districts are easier to misquote. We'll pull the real DLD comparables for wherever you're looking, however few transactions there are.