The first half of 2026 closed at 86,024 sales worth Dh286.46 billion. Against H1 2025, that is 13.1 percent fewer deals and 12.9 percent less value, and against any year before 2021 it would be a record by a wide margin. Inside those six months sit three distinct stories: a correction that began, on schedule, in December; a regional conflict that froze decision making in March; and a June in which the waiting simply stopped. This is the half, month by month, with the one reading rule most commentary gets wrong.
The half in one table
| Month | Sales | Volume MoM | Value | Value MoM | Price signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 17,423 | Dh72.33B | momentum stalling under a record month | ||
| February | 17,036 | about 2% lower | Dh60.79B | 16.0% lower | first soft prints |
| March | 13,523 | 20.6% lower | Dh43.63B | 28.2% lower | VPI 5.9% down |
| April | 14,035 | 3.8% higher | Dh48.20B | 10.5% higher | VPI 1.9% down |
| May | 10,279 | 26.8% lower | Dh28.91B | 40.0% lower | median Dh1,650 per sqft |
| June | 13,728 | 33.6% higher | Dh32.61B | 12.8% higher | median Dh1,690 per sqft, up 2.5% |
Figures follow the DLD sales-only series as compiled in the monthly market reports; live dashboard cuts such as DXBinteract differ by up to about 1.5 percent depending on the data vintage. Price signals cite the ValuStrat index for March and April and DXBinteract medians for May and June.
December: where the turn started
The slowdown did not begin with the conflict. It began in December, the way it usually does: year-end seasonality took the urgency out of the market, and after several years of near-uninterrupted price growth, asking prices had reached the point where a correction was not a risk but a requirement. The last soft prints of 2025 were the market exhaling, and buyers who had been chasing listings all year suddenly had time to think. That pause carried into the new year underneath what looked, on the surface, like a spectacular January.
January and February: record value, softening floor
January posted Dh72.33 billion across 17,423 sales, over a quarter of the half's entire value in one month. The headline was real, but it was driven by carryover of year-end decisions, several large luxury completions and heavy launch activity, not by fresh urgency. Underneath it, price momentum was already stalling. February kept volume almost flat at 17,036 deals while value fell 16 percent: the mix was thinning at the top, and the correction that started in December was now visible in the tape. Late in the month, regional tensions began building.
March: the conflict lands
In March the conflict erupted, and its effect on decision making was immediate and dramatic. Sales fell 20.6 percent to 13,523 and value dropped 28.2 percent to Dh43.63 billion. The sharpest real-time signal was the ready market: title-deed transactions, which register within days of the decision, fell roughly 35 percent. The ValuStrat price index recorded 5.9 percent off in a single month, the first broad decline since the pandemic. Ramadan overlapped the same weeks and thinned activity further, but the driver was not the calendar: buyers, above all investors, stopped deciding while the region's direction was unclear.
The reading rule: registrations are not decisions
Here is the rule that most H1 commentary missed, and it changes how every number above should be read. An off-plan sale registers in Oqood roughly two months after the buyer actually signed; a ready transfer registers within days. So each month's off-plan count is an echo of decisions made about two months earlier, while the ready series is close to real time.
Apply that to the tape. March's off-plan registrations, down only about 21 percent, were mostly January decisions surfacing; the ready market's 35 percent drop was the honest March. April's bounce, up 10.5 percent in value, was to a meaningful degree February's pre-conflict decisions clearing the registration pipeline, not an April recovery. May, down 40 percent in value, is where the conflict's true echo arrived in the off-plan series. And the fact that roughly seven in ten H1 registrations were off-plan does not mean off-plan demand sailed through the conflict untouched: part of that share is simply the pre-conflict backlog registering on a delay. Anyone who quotes the off-plan share as proof of unbroken demand is reading a delayed tape as if it were live.
April and May: the echo, not the event
Read with the lag, April's headline improvement was a technical month, and May was the real trough: 10,279 sales, Dh28.91 billion, the softest month of the half, with the median at Dh1,650 per square foot. This was the point of maximum caution, when both the real-time ready series and the delayed off-plan series were finally telling the same story.
June: the waiting stopped
Then the memorandum between Iran and the US was signed, and the buyers who had spent the spring waiting for lower prices stopped waiting, almost all at once; I watched it happen in my own call log before I saw it in any dataset. June closed at 13,728 sales, up 33.6 percent on May, with value up 12.8 percent and the median price per square foot recovering 2.5 percent to Dh1,690. Critically for the reading rule above, the ready series rebounded in real time, which is the honest signal that confidence returned; the full off-plan echo of June's launch demand will only surface in the August registration data. The month's detail, including the launch sell-outs at Arancia and RAW District, is in my June market brief.
Off-plan and secondary across the half
For the half as a whole, off-plan took 58,842 registrations, 68 percent of volume, worth Dh139.75 billion; ready properties took 27,182 registrations but slightly more value, Dh146.71 billion, on an average ticket of Dh5.40 million against off-plan's Dh2.37 million. The structure of the market did not change in H1: launches absorb the volume and the entry-level demand, while the secondary market carries the value, the luxury completions, and, as I wrote in the June brief, almost all of the negotiating room. Villas were the half's supply story, with registrations down over 60 percent on fewer new launches, while commercial value exploded more than 400 percent on landmark institutional deals, a reminder that the undersupplied commercial segment is where scarcity actually lives.
What I told my clients, and what I am watching in H2
Through the winter I told waiting buyers the truth: the correction was ordinary and seasonal, and the prices they were waiting for were arriving. Through March and April I told them the opposite of the headlines: the off-plan tape looked calm only because it was delayed, and the ready market was showing the real damage. Since the memorandum, the queue has emptied into the market, and the July question is whether launch supply can keep pace with it. My H2 watchlist: the August Oqood data, which will reveal June's true off-plan demand; the ready-sales series as the live confidence gauge; the rental standoff between holdout landlords and the summer lull that I flagged in June; and the H2 launch calendar, starting with Palm Central. If you want this level of reading on a specific purchase, message me.
Source data: DLD transaction series as compiled in Kelt and Co monthly and H1 2026 reports, ValuStrat Price Index (March, April), DXBinteract dashboards (May, June medians), CNBC and Gulf Business coverage of the March ready-market drop, my own client records. Vintage differences between DLD cuts are noted above; verify any single figure against the current release before quoting it onward.