DXBFinance

How we calculate the DXBFI Index

The headline number is built to be a real price read — not an artefact of which properties happened to trade this week.

Source

Dubai Land Department open-data sale transactions (group: Sales) and Ejari rental contracts, ingested locally. DLD publishes with roughly a one-day lag and its portal serves the current calendar year, so an edition published Sunday covers data through about the preceding Thursday — which is why each issue is dated “week ending”.

The index

  • Stratified. Residential sales (Unit and Villa) are bucketed by area × property type, and each bucket's median price per sqft is taken over a trailing 28-day window.
  • Mix-adjusted. Buckets are combined using a fixed basket of weights, so a week heavy on one segment — say, a flood of sub-million off-plan units in Dubai South — cannot move the headline. Only genuine price changes do. This is the whole point: the raw citywide average can swing on composition alone.
  • Robust. Per-bucket prices are winsorised (1st/99th percentile) and buckets with fewer than five transactions are suppressed.
  • Lines. We report the overall index, off-plan vs ready, and a residential gross-yield line (annual rent per sqft ÷ sale price per sqft, residential units only, with implausible >20% buckets excluded as data errors).

Reading the deltas

Month-over-month is the headline beat — real estate is a slow asset class — and week-over-week is shown as a secondary tick. Both are measured against earlier entries in the index series, so the very first issue shows them as not-yet-available.