Off-plan was 0.1% of Dubai office sales in 2021. It's 64.9% now.

Every launch that gets built starts as a bet — the developer bets buyers will pay ahead of completion, and buyers bet the building will be worth more once it exists. For most of the last decade in Dubai's office market, that bet was a minority position: ready stock did the majority of the trading. In the space of about eighteen months, that flipped. Here's how, told in four phases rather than one chart.

2015–2018: off-plan was normal, then it faded

Off-plan made up 21.0% of office sales in 2015 and 17.1% in 2016 — a meaningful, unremarkable share of a market still working through post-2014 corrections. It then eroded steadily: 7.7% in 2017, 6.7% in 2018. Nothing dramatic happened in any single year; buyers simply drifted toward completed stock as the broader price correction made "wait and see" the rational move.

2019–2021: the freeze

The erosion continued into 4.3% (2019) and 4.4% (2020), and then essentially hit zero: 0.1% in 2021. Developers had paused launches through the pandemic disruption, and almost every office transaction that year was a resale of something already built. This is the low point on the chart below, and it's worth sitting with — a functioning, liquid off-plan office market effectively didn't exist in Dubai for that one year.

2022–2024: a slow, uneven return

Recovery from near-zero was gradual, not explosive: 1.0% in 2022, 4.1% in 2023, 6.0% in 2024 — three years to climb back to roughly where the market had been in 2018. Anyone reading the market in early 2024 could reasonably have concluded off-plan was a permanently smaller feature of the office market than it used to be.

2025–2026: the flip

That read didn't survive 2025. The share jumped to 31.0% — more than five times the 2024 level — and then to 64.9% year-to-date in 2026, a majority of the market. Two years took off-plan from a rounding error to more than half of every office sale. Nothing in the 2022-2024 trajectory predicted a move this sharp; it's the kind of inflection that only shows up once you're already past it.

The other half of the story: off-plan stopped being the discount

Here's what changed alongside the share, and it matters for anyone reading this trend as simply "buyers came back." In 2020, ready and off-plan office space traded at almost the same median — AED 655 versus AED 500 a square foot, off-plan actually the cheaper option, the traditional relationship. By 2026, ready offices carry a median of AED 1,789 a square foot; off-plan carries AED 3,903 — more than double. Off-plan didn't just recover its share of the market. It recovered as the more expensive way in.

One plausible piece of the mechanism: the average office ticket size has climbed from AED 631,680 in 2020 to AED 2,561,280 in 2026 — roughly four times larger (see our piece on the market's shift to cash buyers, linked below). Bigger tickets paired with staged, multi-year payment plans are exactly the structure that makes an off-plan launch easier to absorb than the same total price paid up front for ready stock, even at a premium — the total check is the same size either way, but the cash-flow shape isn't.

Off-plan used to be the discount. Now it's the premium — and the majority of the market is paying it.— OSNOVA analysis

Whether that premium is justified depends entirely on the specific project, the developer's delivery record, and the completion timeline — exactly the kind of check that's worth doing before signing, not after.