What The Dubai Desk means by a building, a line and a window

Three words do most of the work on this site, and none of them is jargon once explained.

A building, or a line

Registered sales are grouped by the set of homes that trade like each other: a tower, a villa group, a sub-community. The Land Department tags most transfers with a project name, and that tag is what the Desk groups on. Where the register leaves a transfer untagged, it is reported in an untagged group rather than assigned to a building by guesswork. Some pages call these groups lines; it means the same thing as a building or a villa group, and the page always names which one it is.

The window

Every headline figure covers the twelve months ending on the date printed on the page. A twelve-month window is long enough to hold a meaningful number of sales in most buildings and short enough to be about the market as it is now. The date moves forward each month when the Desk re-reads the register, and each page prints its own.

When a median is printed, and when it is not

A median is the middle sale: half the registered transfers were above it and half below. It is only a fair summary when there are enough sales to have a middle. So the Desk prints a median where eight or more resales registered in the window, a range from lowest to highest where three to seven did, and only the count where fewer than three did. A page that shows a range or a count is not incomplete; it is refusing to invent a precision the register does not support.

The rate per square foot

Registered price divided by registered area. It is the figure that lets you compare a small unit with a large one, or one building with its neighbour, and it is the check to run against any asking price.

What is never on the site

No unit numbers, no plot numbers, no owner names, no listings, no asking prices, no agent estimates. The register is published at the grain of a building and no finer, and every figure can be traced to the transfers behind it.

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.