Laura · The Agent Dubai · March 2026 · theagentdubai.com
As I write this, I am sitting in my garden office while my 4-year-old plays outside with his four friends. I can hear them laughing. I am reading posts about this beautiful country I have called home for more than 18 years.
And I need to say something.
There is a narrative being pushed right now. Geopolitical tension in the region. Negative headlines. Influencers parachuting in for content. And a world that thinks it understands Dubai from the outside.
Let me tell you what Dubai actually looks like from the inside.
This is a city of families. Of roots. Of home.
Dubai’s population is 92% expat, that is not a footnote, that is the entire story. The city has crossed 4 million residents, and it keeps growing because people are not passing through. They are staying.
Dubai grew by 231,000 new residents in 2025 alone a 6.1% increase in a single year. The year before, it added another 208,600. Two consecutive years of 200,000+ arrivals. That is not a trend. That is a verdict.
I stayed here through the crash of the late 2000s. I stayed through the pandemic. And I am here now, through what nobody expected 2026 to bring. So did countless other families. Because this is where our lives are not where we are waiting out a storm.
There is an end-user market. Not a speculator’s playground.
For the first 15 years of my career in Dubai real estate, the market was driven almost entirely by investors. Expat families rented. That was the model. Everyone knew it. Nobody questioned it.
That changed, fundamentally after 2020. And I am not speaking from instinct. I am speaking from data.
Residential mortgage activity in Dubai rose to around 44,000 transactions in 2025, up over 20% year-on-year. In Q1 2025 alone, Dubai registered 9,300 residential mortgage transactions — a 24% increase on the year before. These are not flippers. These are families financing their permanent homes.
The mortgage surge is not speculation. It is families financing forever homes under a framework specifically designed to identify them.
Here is how we know, with certainty.
The UAE Central Bank makes the distinction for us. Their regulatory framework sets strict loan-to-value limits by buyer type, and those limits act as a fingerprint:
| Buyer Type | Max LTV | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| End-user/first home | Up to 80% | Only available to buyers purchasing their primary residence |
| Investor, second property or buy-to-let | 50–60% | Deposits of 40%+ required. Higher income and strong banking relationship needed even for this band. |
When you see mortgages coming through at 75–80% LTV, the Central Bank has already told you who that buyer is. You do not need to guess. An investor cannot access that band. It is not opinion, it is regulation.
Now look at the most recent data on completed, ready properties, units where the mortgage and the sale completed in the same month. No off-plan. No payment plans. Real homes, real buyers, real financing:
| Month | Total Ready Transactions | Mortgage Penetration | Mortgage Transactions |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2025 | 4,357 | 38.5% | 1,677 |
| November 2025 | 5,397 | 38.7% | 2,088 |
| December 2025 | 4,688 | 37.3% | 1,749 |
| January 2026 | 5,158 | 36.3% | 1,872 |
In just four months, approximately 7,386 families financed and took possession of a completed home in Dubai. Month after month, more than one in three completed home purchases is being financed with a mortgage.
That is not an investor market. Investors pay cash, or they put down 40% deposits at capped LTV bands. These numbers point directly at families making long-term commitments to this city.
The world’s biggest companies agree.
This is not just families voting with their mortgages. It is boardrooms voting with their balance sheets.
Dubai International Chamber attracted 373 companies to Dubai in 2025, an 80% increase from 207 in 2024. That included 64 multinational corporations and 309 SMEs, the latter up 98% year-on-year.
The names tell the story. In April 2025, PayPal opened its first regional headquarters in Dubai to serve more than 80 markets across the Middle East and Africa. Nasdaq-listed telecoms giant Veon relocated its global headquarters to Dubai, becoming one of the largest multinationals now based in the city. DMCC surpassed 24,000 member companies. DIFC now has over 5,500 registered firms with total banking assets exceeding $650 billion.
When PayPal moves its regional HQ here to serve 80 markets, it does not send a skeleton team. It sends executives. With families. Those families need schools. They need homes. They get mortgages. That is your end-user market, walking through the door.
Why did people go from renting to buying?
The government changed what it means to belong here.
For decades, expat life in Dubai ran on two-year employment visas, tied to a company that could let you go tomorrow. You did not plant trees. You did not buy. You waited to see what came next.
Then the rules changed completely. The property visa tied residency to real estate ownership rather than a sponsor or employer, granting legal residency, the ability to sponsor your entire family, and the freedom to enter and exit the country without restriction. Your visa now lives in your house, not in your job title.
The Golden Visa programme extended this further, 10-year renewable residency, self-sponsored, with no mandatory renewal every two years and no requirement to remain in the country six months of the year just to keep your status alive.
For the first time in Dubai’s history, you could commit. You could plant trees. You could buy a home, put your children in a school, and know that your life here belonged to you not to a company contract.
The two-year contract became a decade. The decade became a life. And the life became home.
And the safety question, since everyone seems to be asking.
I understand the questions. The headlines can sound alarming from the outside.
So let me summarise what Dubai actually is, from someone who has lived every version of it.
I arrived in my late twenties. I built my career through my thirties. I am writing this in my forties, from a garden office, listening to my son laugh.
This emirate gave me something I could not have imagined asking for. A career, a home I own, a community, a life and when I chose to adopt my beautiful boy as a single mother, it gave me that too. No questions. No barriers. Just the space to build a family on my own terms.
My peers in other countries talented, hardworking people with good jobs are still renting. Still worried about their safety. Still unable to get a foot on the property ladder. Still waiting for a version of life that feels settled.
I am not waiting. I have been living it for 18 years.
Dubai ranked as the world’s safest city in 2024, with the highest global safety index score of 86.8 and the lowest crime levels recorded worldwide. But I did not need a ranking to tell me that. I needed it the day I brought my son home.
The headlines do not live here. We do.
This is not just a real estate market. It is the place that made my life possible. And for that, I will never stop telling its story.