Verify before you buy: the 10-minute due-diligence check

Almost every off-plan horror story starts the same way: the buyer paid before checking. The checks below take about ten minutes, use only official sources, and would have stopped most of those stories at step one. Run them in order, before any money moves — including the "fully refundable" booking deposit.

The checklist

1. Confirm the project is registered with DLD. Search the project in our directory — it covers all 695 projects in the official registry — then verify at the source via the Dubai REST app or dubailand.gov.ae (step-by-step guide here). You want to see the project itself, its registered developer, its status and its certified progress. No registry entry means no legal off-plan sale: stop here.
2. Confirm the escrow account — and that payments go only to it. Ask, in writing, for the project's escrow account details: account name, bank, account number or IBAN. Registered projects have a project-specific escrow account at a DLD-approved bank, and every payment you ever make should go into it. An answer that names a personal account, a different company, or asks for cash is a walk-away signal, not a negotiating point.
3. Check the developer's actual track record. Not the brochure — the delivery record. Our developer league table scores every registered developer on how much of their active portfolio is running past its planned handover, from official registry data. A developer with several long-overdue projects can still be a fine choice — but you should price that in knowingly.
4. Confirm the broker is RERA-registered. Every practising Dubai broker holds a RERA broker card with a registration number (BRN). Ask to see it, and verify the broker and their brokerage through the Dubai REST app. An unregistered "consultant" has no regulator to answer to — and often no permission to sell you anything.
5. Sanity-check the price against real data. Look up the project's area in our area pages: real sale prices per square foot from official DLD transactions, plus rents and yields where the data is thick enough. A quoted price far above the area's going rate needs a very good explanation; so does one suspiciously below it.

If a check fails

One failed check is not always fraud — but it always means pause. A missing registry entry can mean a project too new to be registered yet (in which case: wait until it is), an escrow answer can be a junior salesperson's confusion (in which case: get the correct answer in writing), and a steep price can be a premium view. The pattern to refuse is pressure to pay before the check can be completed. Legitimate sellers survive ten minutes of scrutiny; the other kind depends on you skipping it.

Make it a habit, not an event

Due diligence doesn't end at the booking form. The same registry you checked today will record the project's certified progress, status and handover date for the years of construction ahead — and the paperwork routine that follows the purchase (Oqood registration, in particular) has its own checks, covered in our Oqood guide.

Related: how to check any project's DLD status · Oqood registration explained · developer track records · real prices by area
General information, not legal advice — for a dispute, speak to a UAE-licensed property lawyer.