How distress.ae Computes Per-Area Distressed-Property Data

Sources

Three primary sources feed the per-area data table on each area page:

• Dubai Land Department (DLD) — the authoritative registry of every property transaction completed in Dubai. Transaction records are released as public open data and include sale price, area, property type, and registration date.
• Dubai Pulse — the Dubai government open data portal that hosts the DLD transaction dataset for programmatic access (dubaipulse.gov.ae). All medians, transaction counts, and as-of dates trace back to records pulled from this portal.
• DXBinteract — an independent aggregator that maps DLD records to standardised area names and building-level rollups. Used as a cross-reference to catch area-naming inconsistencies and confirm the median computation against an outside view.

Distress-discount ranges additionally draw on the distress.ae listings inventory and DLD eMart auction results — see the per-metric definitions below.

What each number means

Median secondary price (AED per sqft)

The median sale price per square foot for completed secondary-market transactions in the area, computed over the 12 months preceding the as-of date. Off-plan registrations (oqood) are excluded — they trade on a different legal and pricing regime, and including them skews the secondary-market signal that distressed buyers actually compete in.

Median is preferred over mean to limit the influence of outlier penthouse and tower-floor sales. We additionally cap top and bottom 5% of records by price-per-sqft to drop clearly-mispriced records (broken plots, mixed-use registrations) before computing the median.

Distress discount range

The observed range — expressed as percentage below the area median — for genuinely distressed listings sold within the same window. Lower bound is the 25th-percentile discount; upper bound is the 75th-percentile discount. Both bounds are computed over the union of:

• distress.ae listings that closed in-window with a seller-disclosed urgency reason (relocation, mortgage stress, off-plan exit, repossession);
• DLD eMart and Dubai Courts execution-sale records mapped to the same area.

The range is the structural moat behind these pages — Bayut and PropertyFinder area pages don't segment distressed transactions out of total transactions.

Transactions, last 90 days

Total count of DLD-registered secondary-market sales in the area over the rolling 90 days preceding the as-of date. Excludes off-plan and oqood registrations. Treat as a proxy for liquidity: high transaction counts mean both that the area is actively trading and that comparable-sale evidence is fresh enough to support negotiation.

As of

The last day of the 90-day window for the transaction count and the 12-month window for the median. Always a date, not a month — to make freshness explicit.

Refresh cadence

Each area page is refreshed when the underlying DLD dataset is updated upstream — typically monthly, no longer than quarterly between bumps. The page's as-of date and the “Last verified” line both move forward together. The sitemap lastModifiedfield tracks the same date so Google's crawler is alerted to the refresh.

Limitations

• Off-plan excluded. Off-plan registrations trade as receivables, not titled property. Distressed off-plan exits show up on our off-plan exit guide rather than in the area-level secondary-market median.
• AED only. All numbers are in dirhams. Buyers paying in another currency should adjust for the AED peg and any conversion costs themselves.
• No yield projections. The data table stops at sale-price metrics. Rental yield, ROI, and forecast appreciation depend on inputs (rent levels, service charges, holding period, financing) that vary more by unit than by area — this page makes no claim about them.
• Sample-size sensitivity. Areas with low 90-day transaction counts have wider confidence intervals on both the median and the distress range. When the count is below 20, treat both numbers as directional rather than precise.

What this page does not claim

Nothing on the per-area pages should be read as investment advice or as a buy/sell recommendation. The data is published to help buyers calibrate negotiation against recent comparables, not to recommend specific buildings, units, or transactions. Distressed property carries above-average risk: above-market service charges, undisclosed liens, occupancy disputes, and developer default risk are real and not visible in summary statistics. Buyers should commission independent valuation and legal review on every transaction.

Corrections

Spotted an error? Email murad.k@distress.ae with the area, the metric, and the correction. Verified corrections are reflected on the next refresh; the underlying claims-and-sources sheets in the site repository are also updated.