Welcome to the second edition of Mo’asher, Dubai’s official sales price index. We have been working on improving the index and extending it to a yearly and quarterly index which you will see in this edition. The quarterly index you will see here is for Q1 2020 and the monthly index for 2020 is until April. The base year for Mo’asher is 2012. The base month for the monthly index is January 2012 and the base quarter for the quarterly index is Q1 2012.
To give a little history and how trends have changed over the last few years, according to the data from Dubai Land Department, Dubai registered a total of 40,517 sales transactions in 2019 which represents a growth of 18 percent in the volume of registered property sales transactions compared to 34,414 registered sales transactions in 2018.
Looking at the data quarterly, since the highs of Q2 2009 when the Dubai property sales market transacted 37,556 sales transaction, the next peak was in Q4 2013 with 20,935 sales transactions when the Dubai real estate market rebounded from the 2007 financial crisis, followed by Q1 2017 with 15,179 sales transactions. The only peak after 2017 was visible in Q4 2019 with 12,448 sales transactions where we started to see transaction volumes increase month-on-month due to the market picking up ahead of EXPO2020.
In H2 of 2019, we started to see sales volumes increase month-on-month. This trend continued until February 2020. In the first quarter of 2020, there was a 16% rise in overall transactions compared to the first quarter of 2019 and February 2020 saw an enormous 40% hike in transactions compared to February 2019.
In March 2020, we started to see a slight decline in sales transactions, in which 3,120 sales transactions were recorded, due to the start of the Covid-19 situation and they continued to decline into April. In April 2020, we saw 1,808 sales transactions recorded, despite being on full lockdown, the Dubai Land Department successfully managed to continue transacting properties digitally.
