How to Read a DLD Transaction Report

Dubai Land Department publishes every transaction openly. Raw DLD data is a goldmine — and a minefield. Misread the fields and you'll confuse gift transfers with market sales, corporate restructures with investor demand, and internal developer moves with real supply.

The core fields

• Transaction date — When contract was registered, not when agreed.
• Transaction type — "Sales", "Mortgage", "Gift", "Succession", "Delayed Sale". Only "Sales" is real market data.
• Property type — Unit, Villa, Plot, Building. "Building" transactions are rare but skew area averages dramatically.
• Procedure — "Sell" vs "Sell Pre-registration" (off-plan assignment).
• Price — Gross. Does not include DLD fees.
• Area (sqft) — Unit net sqft. For off-plan, this is sometimes actual-vs-sold-area discrepancy.
• Rooms — Bedrooms. Watch for "Studio" coded as 0 or 1 inconsistently.

Landmines

• Gift transfers — Often show price = AED 0 or symbolic AED 10. Always filter these out.
• Corporate shells — Property moved between related entities. Price may look fake. Cross-check via owner name pattern.
• Off-plan assignments — Original investor selling their pre-handover position to next buyer. Price may reflect assignment premium, not true property value.
• Bulk building sales — Entire towers transferred. AED 500M transactions that skew area averages.
• Corrections and cancellations — Rare but present. Negative transactions cancel earlier entries.

What clean DLD analysis looks like

1. Filter to "Sales" transaction type only
2. Exclude sub-AED-100,000 prices (almost always non-market)
3. Separate plot and building transactions from units and villas
4. Flag transactions where price/sqft is 3+ std deviations from area median
5. Aggregate by month for trend analysis, not by day
6. Weight by area and bedroom, not raw counts

How REMAP normalizes

REMAP ingests DLD data daily, applies the cleaning rules above, links transactions to specific buildings, and computes area/building-level price velocity, median price/sqft, and deviation metrics. This is what feeds the ROI calculator and the off-plan tracker.

DIY option

DLD publishes open data at dubailand.gov.ae. Download CSVs for the period you want, load into Excel/Python, apply the filters above. Expect 1–2 days to get usable output on first attempt.