How to read a Dubai Land Department transaction record
The Dubai Land Department publishes every registered property transaction as open data, and anyone can read it. Most people never do, because a raw record is a row of codes. This is what the fields mean and how The Dubai Desk turns them into a price you can use.
The fields that matter
The date is the day the transfer was registered, not the day the deal was agreed. The procedure says what kind of transfer it was: a sale, a mortgage, a gift, a grant, a delayed sale on an instalment plan, and several others. The registration type says whether the property was off-plan or an existing home at the time. The area and the project say where it is, at community and building grain. The property type and sub-type say whether it is a flat, a villa, a plot or a building, and the rooms field sometimes carries the bedroom count. The amount is the registered price, and the size is the registered area, from which the rate per square foot is calculated.
What the Desk keeps and what it leaves out
A registered resale on this site is a transfer whose procedure is a sale, whose property was an existing home rather than off-plan, whose amount is above a floor that excludes token transfers, and which is counted once even if the register carries it twice. Off-plan launches, mortgages, gifts and instalment plans are real records and they are left out on purpose, because mixing them into a resale price makes the price wrong. The Desk also leaves out anything below the grain of a building: no unit numbers, no plot numbers, no owner names, ever.
Where the gaps come from
Some transfers carry no project name, so the Desk reports them as a group rather than guessing which building they belong to. Some buildings register no sale in a year, and the page says so instead of inventing a figure. Some registered amounts are far below the market because the transfer was not an ordinary sale, and those are why the Desk reports medians and counts, not the lowest print.
Why this is worth the trouble
Because every number on this site can be traced back to a register entry, the figures can be checked by anyone with the same open data, and they are rebuilt every month from a saved extract. That is a different kind of claim from an average of listings, and it is the reason the pages say "registered, not asking" on every one of them.
See it applied: the eleven district desks and the Desk's method page. Source: Dubai Land Department registered transactions. No asking prices, no agent estimates.