Where every number comes from
A data product is only as trustworthy as its willingness to show its work. This page is the complete recipe — sources, formulas, and the limits we'd rather admit than hide. It applies to all 679 tracked projects, every day.
The percentage on every project page
Progress comes from the Dubai Land Department's official project registry, which records a completion percentage after each physical inspection of the site. Inspections typically happen every one to three months, so a quiet month usually means "not inspected yet", not "nothing built".
We snapshot the registry every morning and store every value ever reported. When today's number differs from yesterday's, that becomes a change event — the thing our email alerts are made of.
Honest limit: the registry occasionally reports impossible values (a project at "6,884%"). We display official figures verbatim in tables, but cap progress bars at 100% and exclude corrupted values from statistics rather than pretending they are meaningful.
The developer's date — and our independent one
The planned handover shown on every project is the developer's official date in the registry (their completion date, or contract end date where no completion date exists). When it moves, we record the old and new dates and alert subscribers.
Our pace forecast is deliberately simple and transparent: we measure how fast a project's percentage has actually moved across our daily snapshots, and extend that straight line to 100%. It unlocks only once we have observed real movement across at least seven days — no data, no forecast.
Honest limit: construction is not linear. A straight-line forecast is an indicator of direction, not a promise. We label it as such everywhere it appears.
Evidence first, vision clearly labeled
Construction photos are official uploads from Dubai Land Department inspections — taken on site by inspectors, hosted on government servers, and shown unedited. We never substitute stock photography or imagery of other buildings, and we never use AI-generated or AI-enhanced images of real projects.
Where a project page shows a polished "completed vision" image, it is the developer's own published render for that exact project, sourced from the developer's official website, credited, and labeled "Developer's render" — always displayed alongside the real inspection photo labeled "Reality today".
Registered transactions, not asking prices
Price figures are computed from sale transactions registered with the DLD — actual completed deals, not listings. We report medians (not averages, which outliers distort) of price per square foot, after filtering obviously corrupted records (missing areas, token values).
Project matching uses the official project name in the transaction record. Some name variants don't match cleanly, so a project showing no price data may still have registered sales under a differently spelled name — we prefer showing nothing over guessing.
Honest limit: the public feed serves the current year. Our archive grows daily and quarterly history compounds from 2026 onward; deeper history will be integrated as official bulk sources come online.
Ejari contracts and honest yield math
Rental figures come from Ejari — Dubai's mandatory rental contract registration system. We compute median annual rent per square foot from residential unit contracts, with the same sanity filters as sales.
Gross yield on area pages is exactly: median rent per sqft per year ÷ median sale price per sqft. It is a gross figure — before service charges and running costs — and we say so wherever it appears. Panels only render where an area has enough contracts (20+) to make a median meaningful.
The on-time score, in plain words
A developer's score (0–100) reflects two things from today's registry: how much of their active portfolio is past its planned handover, and how far past. A portfolio a month late is not judged like a portfolio a year late.
Small developers get a statistical adjustment: shares are blended toward the market-wide average with the weight of a few phantom projects, so a single lucky project can't top the table and a single unlucky one can't sink it. Ties rank the bigger portfolio first — more evidence, more confidence.
The score sharpens automatically as our daily history accumulates actual slip records per developer.
When we say a project may have stalled
We flag a project as possibly stalled when its official progress has not moved across at least 120 days of our daily tracking — roughly four missed inspection cycles. The flag clears automatically the moment progress moves, and subscribers are alerted to both events.
Honest limit: a stalled percentage does not always mean an abandoned site. Inspections lag genuine work. That's why the flag says "possibly", and why it links to a guide on what buyers can actually do.
Every morning, without exception
Our pipeline runs daily at 07:05 Dubai time: snapshot the full registry, diff it against yesterday, record every change, refresh inspection photos, archive the latest registered sales and rental contracts, rebuild every page, and email subscribers whose projects changed.
Every page on this site is regenerated from the database each morning — nothing is hand-edited, and no number is ever typed in by a human.
Found something wrong?
If a number on this site contradicts the official registry, we want to know within the day. Tell us here — corrections ship in the next morning's rebuild.