Dubai Offices, Shops and Hotel Rooms in Dollars

Search for Dubai property in the United States and you get apartments. Studios, one bedrooms, yield tables. That is a fair reflection of where the volume is. It is not the whole register.

In August 2026 the Dubai Land Department recorded 723 sales of offices, shops, hotel apartments and hotel rooms. Together they were worth about $521.9 million, or 6.2 percent of the 11,600 registered sales that month. These are the segments a US investor asks about after the first conversation, and there is almost nothing published on them.

What each type actually costs

Property sub type	Sales	Median price	Median size	Median per sq ft	Total value
Office	319	$536,573	1,053 sq ft	$550	$303.7m
Hotel apartment	235	$155,306	383 sq ft	$425	$109.4m
Shop	95	$625,942	834 sq ft	$777	$91.2m
Hotel room	74	$219,741	308 sq ft	$928	$17.7m
Standard flat (for reference)	9,400	$296,801	730 sq ft	$462	$4,054.5m

Three things jump out. Hotel rooms are the most expensive square feet in the register at $928, more than double a standard flat. Shops come next at $777. And the cheapest rate in the whole table belongs to hotel apartments at $425, below a normal flat.

The US reference point

For an American reader the useful anchor is what the same money buys at home.

Purchase	Price	Against the US median home
Median Dubai shop	$625,942	1.46 times
Median Dubai office	$536,573	1.25 times
US median existing home (NAR)	$429,100	1.00
Median Dubai hotel room	$219,741	0.51 times
Median Dubai hotel apartment	$155,306	0.36 times

A hotel room in Dubai costs about half of what the middle American house costs. A hotel apartment costs about a third. Those are the two entry points in this table, and both are small enough that a US buyer can reach them without a mortgage.

Be careful with the per square foot column further up. The US benchmark most people reach for is $224 per square foot, which is the FRED median listing price per square foot for August 2026. That series covers homes offered for sale, not offices or retail. There is no matching US commercial series in the same monthly form, so we have not built a commercial to commercial ratio. We are not going to invent one.

Offices are half off plan and heavily concentrated

Of the 319 office sales, 184 were off plan and 135 were ready. That is a striking split for a commercial asset. You are buying a floor plate that does not exist yet, from a payment plan, with no tenant and no rent roll.

Location is concentrated too. Business Bay took 94 of the 319 office sales. Downtown Jebel Ali took 69. Jumeirah Lakes Towers took 35. Those three areas were 198 of 319, or 62 percent of the office market in a single month.

The middle half of office prices ran from $385,910 to $835,807. This is small lot commercial. It is strata office space sold unit by unit, not whole floors let to corporates.

Hotel apartments cluster in one place

Hotel apartments look like the value play on the table at $425 per square foot. Read where they are before you decide that.

133 of the 235 hotel apartment sales were in Downtown Jebel Ali, at the far southern end of the city. Another 40 were in Al Furjan. Only 14 were in the Burj Khalifa area. The low rate is not a discount on prime Dubai. It is the price of a specific and fairly remote submarket.

171 of the 235 were off plan. The median size of 383 square feet tells you what these are. They are compact serviced units bought for a rental programme, not homes.

Shops carry the widest spread

The shop segment is only 95 sales but it has the widest price range relative to its size. The middle half runs from $410,892 to $1,274,897. That is a three times spread inside the interquartile range alone, against roughly two times for offices.

Retail is the segment where the specific unit matters most. Frontage, floor, footfall and the tenant mix of the building drive the number far more than the community average does. A median for 95 shops spread across Jumeirah Village Circle, Meydan One and International City is a starting point and nothing more.

What this means for a US buyer

• Freehold is not the constraint here. 312 of 319 offices, 94 of 95 shops and all 235 hotel apartments and 74 hotel rooms were freehold.
• Off plan is the constraint. Across these four types, 440 of 723 sales were off plan. If you want an income producing asset from day one you are shopping in a much smaller pool than these counts suggest.
• Sample sizes are small. 74 hotel room sales in a month is thin. Treat the hotel room median as indicative and not as a valuation.
• Yield is not in this file. The register records what was paid. It records nothing about rent, occupancy, service charge or the operator agreement behind a hotel unit. Those decide whether any of this works as an investment.

Method and limits

• Dubai source. The Dubai Land Department transaction register covering 1 August 2026 to 31 August 2026, 15,955 rows. We used the 11,600 rows in the Sales group and split them by the register's own property sub type field.
• Vintage. The register copy used here was downloaded on 2 September 2026. On 20 September 2026 we could not reach the Dubai Land Department open data portal from our environment to confirm whether a later monthly file has been published.
• A labelling quirk worth knowing. Every one of these 723 sales carries Residential in the register's usage field, including the offices and the shops. The usage field in this file marks something other than what the space is used for, so we classified by property sub type instead. We flag it because anyone recomputing from the same file will hit it.
• US comparison. The $429,100 is the National Association of Realtors median existing home price for August 2026, released 10 September 2026. It is a sold price for existing homes. The $224 per square foot is FRED series MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEEUS for August 2026, which is a listing figure from Realtor.com. Sold and listing data are not interchangeable and we have kept them apart.
• No US commercial benchmark. There is no monthly NAR or FRED series for US office, retail or hotel unit prices in a form comparable to this. We have not substituted a proxy.
• Currency. Dirhams converted at the fixed peg of 3.6725 dirhams to the dollar.
• Area. Square metres converted at 10.7639 square feet per square metre. Price per square foot is computed per transaction and the median of those taken, not total value over total area.
• One month. August 2026 only. Segments this small move a long way month to month.

Apartment buyers should start with how big a Dubai apartment is compared with a US home. For houses and plots, see what a whole Dubai building costs.

Market research, not personal investment advice. Cresco Real Estate is licensed in Dubai under RERA ORN 34288.