How the Property Index (PIX©) Is Calculated
What PIX© measures
PIX© is a monthly price index for Dubai residential property. It answers one question: how did prices move, holding constant what sold. A month in which more studios change hands than penthouses should not read as a price fall, so the index is mix-adjusted by construction rather than a simple average of the month's sales.
Source data
Every input is a sale registered with the Dubai Land Department - the transfer record, not listings, asking prices or valuations. The universe is residential apartments and villas. Records pass standing validity filters (positive price and area, plausible price-per-sqft bounds) before entering the calculation; the filters remove data errors, not inconvenient months.
Stratification
Sales are grouped into cells of area × property type × bedroom bucket (for example, Dubai Marina · apartment · 2-bed). Cells, not individual sales, are the unit of measurement: comparing a cell with itself over time is what holds the mix constant.
Cell pricing
A cell's price in a month is the median price per square foot over a three-month pooled window, and a cell only prices when the window holds at least five registered sales. Pooling stabilises thin months without smoothing away genuine movement; the median resists the outliers a registered dataset inevitably contains. A cell that stops trading carries its last price forward for at most twelve months, after which it drops out until it trades again.
Weighting and chaining
Cell price movements aggregate into the index as a weighted average, with weights proportional to each cell's all-time registered transaction count (with a minimum floor, so no cell's weight rests on a handful of sales). The index is chained: each month's movement is computed against the previous month over the cells both months share, and the level is the cumulative product of those movements, expressed against January 2012 = 100. Chaining means cells entering or leaving the sample shift the composition, never the level.
Segments
The headline series is all residential. Four sub-indices are computed the same way over their own cells: apartments, villas, ready and off-plan. Each is published with the same base convention.
Coverage and revisions
The published series begins in January 2012. Earlier registered data exists but does not meet our publication standard: registration practice in the early years distorts when - not whether - sales entered the register, which an index of monthly movements cannot absorb honestly. Only complete months are published, and the most recent month may revise as late registrations are recorded. Historical months are recomputed only under a methodology version change, which would be stated on this page.
Limitations
PIX© is an index of market-level price movement, not a valuation of any specific unit. The Dubai Land Department register carries no public unit identifier, so PIX© does not claim repeat-sales pairing of individual homes; mix adjustment operates at cell level. Within a cell, quality differences - view, floor, condition, payment terms - remain. For a legally defensible valuation of a specific property, instruct a DLD-accredited valuer.
A worked example (illustrative)
Take a cell: Dubai Marina · apartment · 2-bed, with illustrative numbers. Over the three months ending in the measured month, the cell records nine registered sales with a median of, say, AED 2,100 per sqft; over the window ending the previous month, its median was AED 2,000. The cell's movement is +5%. The same is done for every cell that clears the five-sale minimum in both windows.
The month's index movement is then the weighted average of those cell movements - a cell with thousands of all-time registered sales moves the index more than a thin one - and the published level is last month's level carried forward by that movement. Note what never happens in this construction: no cell is compared with a different cell, and no month's level is recomputed from scratch. That is what "chained and mix-adjusted" means in practice.
Data dictionary - the CSV
The free CSV carries one row per segment per month:
| segment | residential (headline), apartment, villa, ready or offplan |
| month | The measured month, YYYY-MM. Only complete months appear |
| index_level | Mix-adjusted index level, January 2012 = 100 |
| yoy_pct | Change vs the same month a year earlier, in percent; empty where the series does not reach back a year |
| median_psf | Raw median registered price per sqft in the month - not mix-adjusted; empty for months not yet captured in the publication ledger |
| tx_count | Registered sales in the month for the segment; empty for months not yet captured in the publication ledger |
Versioning
The method on this page is chained-stratified-median-v1, effective July 2026. A methodological change - a different stratification, window, weighting or chaining rule - is published as a new version string, the series is recomputed under it, and this page states the change. Figures already published in monthly releases remain attributable to the version that produced them: the publication ledger stores each captured month against its methodology version and is append-only by construction.
Citing PIX©
Cite the index as: PropertyIndex, PIX© Dubai Residential Price Index (base January 2012 = 100), methodology chained-stratified-median-v1. https://www.propertyindex.ae/dubai-real-estate-price-index
Monthly figures should cite their dated release page, and the full series is available as a CSV download.
Common questions
PIX© groups DLD registered sales into cells of area, property type and bedroom count; prices each cell as the median price per sqft over a three-month pooled window (minimum five sales); weights cells by their all-time transaction counts; and chains each month’s cell-level movements into a cumulative index expressed against a base of 100. The result measures price movement with the mix of what sold held constant.
Earlier registered data exists but does not meet our publication standard: registration practice in the early years distorts when - not whether - sales entered the register, and an index of monthly movements cannot absorb that honestly. We exclude those years rather than explain around them.
Because averages follow composition. A month heavy with studio sales drags a raw average down without any home getting cheaper, and a cluster of penthouse transfers does the reverse. Cell-level comparison over time is what separates price movement from a change in what happened to sell.
No. Every input is a sale registered with the Dubai Land Department - the transfer record. No listings, no asking prices, no broker estimates, no valuation models feed the index.
No, and deliberately so: the DLD transactions register carries no public unit identifier, so honest repeat-sales pairing of individual homes is not possible from the register alone. PIX© claims exactly what its data supports - mix adjustment at cell level - and states the residual limitation openly: within a cell, quality differences like view, floor and condition remain.
They measure different things. The DLD’s rental index is the official reference for rents, used for permissible rent-increase calculations, with registered Ejari contracts underneath. PIX© is a sales price index computed from registered transfers. PropertyIndex uses Ejari contracts for rental figures and yields, and PIX© for price movement - never one as a substitute for the other.
Two things, both stated rather than silent: the most recent month of the series may revise as late registrations land, and a methodology change creates a new version under which the series is recomputed - with old published releases remaining attributable to the version that produced them. Monthly release pages freeze their figures once captured into the publication ledger.