Ask whether Dubai has enough office space and the answer is usually a number. Ask who can buy that space, and the answer gets much harder to find.
Cushman & Wakefield counted more than ten commercial projects, mostly offices, launched for sale in the year to mid-2025, after almost no new office sales activity 18 months earlier. Most were in secondary and emerging locations such as Arjan, Majan and Motor City rather than the core districts. They were often sold unit by unit or floor by floor.
Those launches show the sales format, not what is on offer in the core. For Business Bay & Sheikh Zayed Road, public evidence on how buildings are owned is thin, and that thinness is part of the story.
That raises a question for the core of the market, Business Bay & Sheikh Zayed Road. Is the limit on institutional investment a shortage of capital, or a shortage of buildings that can be bought whole? Our thesis is the second. The evidence supports it in part, and it cannot be proved from public data.
Our published Dive on strata versus single ownership looks at the question from the occupier's side. This analysis asks it from the institutional investor's.
Why a building sold in pieces is a different asset
Strata is the local term for individually titled units inside a shared building. One owner holds a suite or a floor, and the owners share the lifts, the façade and the car park. The model suits a developer, who recovers its money as it builds. It also suits a private buyer with a few million dirhams to place.
It suits a long-term institution less. A fund that wants to control leasing, refurbishment and eventual sale generally needs the whole asset, and a whole asset is hard to assemble from fragments. That is our reasoning, not a measured fact.
Whether occupiers still prefer a single owner is not something the public sources we could use settle.
The complaint is not new. In 2013, JLL was quoted by Bloomberg (as republished by the Arabian Post on 25 December 2013) as saying there was "a serious lack of institutional investment-grade product in Dubai", and that tenants wanting a single owner "wouldn't even consider a strata building".
Thirteen years on, similar points recur in broker commentary. That persistence hints at a structural feature of the core districts rather than a phase a young market will outgrow. It is a hint, not a finding.
What the deals show, and what they hide
Capital is certainly active. What the public record does not tell us is what it is buying. We found no count that separates whole-building sales from sales of units and floors, so a large deal total could describe either.
Cushman & Wakefield's review of 2025 says a great number of strata floors changed hands in the main business districts, Business Bay among them. It gives no count. The money is arriving in some quantity, and it is landing in fragments, which is what the thesis predicts.
That does not show larger buyers were turned away. Nobody publishes that.
One broker puts prime office yields at about 7% to 9%, three to five percentage points above mature European markets at 4% to 5.75%. The basis, gross or net, is not defined, and the figure is one broker's opinion from June 2025. If it holds, it would attract yield-seeking funds. It still describes what a buyer might earn, not what is available to buy.
The number nobody publishes
The central figure is missing. We found no public source that splits Dubai's office stock into single-owner, strata and multi-owner buildings. Dubai Land Department title records could in principle be used to build the split. We did not retrieve them.
What exists are proxies, and each answers a different question:
- The pipeline model, build-to-sell or build-to-let, describes future supply, not today's stock.
- Grade B, the older and lower-specification space, is nearly 70% of inventory according to Cushman & Wakefield. That is a quality split, not an ownership one.
- Deal counts show activity, not who owns what.
The gap is part of the story. An institution weighing an entry needs to know how much of the market it could ever buy. If nobody can say, the market is hard to underwrite however much capital is available. That, too, is inference. But an enthusiast and a sceptic alike should be able to settle it with a number, and at present neither can.
The evidence is also uneven across the two districts. The pipeline finding is specific to Business Bay. For Sheikh Zayed Road we found little ownership-specific public data, so the corridor is covered here mostly through Dubai-wide commentary.
The case against the thesis
Whole buildings do trade. In July 2024 an Abu Dhabi-based developer-investor signed an agreement to buy a newly built, fully occupied office building of over 90,000 sq ft in Dubai Internet City, completed in March 2024. The price was not disclosed. In 2025 a whole office tower in Dubai Media City sold for about AED 248m (Cushman & Wakefield's review of 2025 capital trends rounds it to AED 250m).
These deals support the counterargument that institutional-scale product exists. They also fit the thesis. They are the handful we found, set against the many large office sales recorded in a single year. One buyer is a developer-investor rather than a purely financial institution. Both buildings sit in Dubai's media and technology free-zone districts, not in the core, so they show that whole-building deals happen in Dubai, not how common they are in Business Bay & Sheikh Zayed Road.
The second challenge is the cycle. Cushman & Wakefield reports that the city-wide average rent in the second quarter of 2026 was AED 205 per sq ft, down 2% on the quarter in a page published on 24 June 2026, the first quarterly fall in nearly five years, with more strata stock returning to the market. Savills, using a different basket of buildings, reported AED 238 in the second quarter, the first quarter without rental growth since the first half of 2021, and AED 241 in the third, described as stable. The two series are not comparable and we have not blended them.
Softer rents cut both ways. If strata buildings are proving weaker investments, the thesis gains. If the scarcity story was written in a boom, the pressure on institutions to find product may be lower than assumed. More returning strata stock could also mean supply is easing, which weakens any claim that investors lack options.
Finally, the sources have interests. Cushman & Wakefield's strata commentary makes the case for long-term, single-owner holding. Brokers are not neutral data providers, which is why registry data matters.
What it means for the market
The implications depend on a thesis that is plausible but unproven. They are scenarios, not forecasts:
- Developers
- A project sold floor by floor funds itself quickly, while a project built to hold needs patient capital.
- Projects announced for the core are not delivered stock, and any pipeline is subject to delay.
- Investors
- Those who want scale may have to rely on the few whole assets that reach the market, or on forward deals with developers.
- We cannot size either route from public data.
- Occupiers
- Tenants who prefer a single landlord may have a narrower choice, if the preference is as strong as reported.
Dubai's office market will keep attracting money. The test of this thesis is whether that money can find whole buildings to own.
The number that would settle it, how much of the stock sits with a single owner, lies in a title registry rather than a broker report. Until it is published, "capital is not the limit" remains an inference, and the sharper question is what that capital is actually allowed to buy.
Sources
- Cushman & Wakefield, "Strata vs. Leasing", 19 June 2025
- Cushman & Wakefield Core, "UAE Capital Trends: Reviewing 2025 and Outlook for 2026", 19 January 2026
- Cushman & Wakefield Core, "Dubai's Office Investment: Stability, Scarcity and Strategic Allocation", 17 June 2025
- Cushman & Wakefield, MarketBeat Office Q2 2026, 24 June 2026
- Savills via Khaleej Times, 22 July 2026
- Savills, Q3 2026, 15 October 2026
- Gulf News on the Dubai Internet City purchase, July 2024
- Aldar Properties press release on its Dubai commercial acquisitions, 24 July 2024
- Bloomberg, republished by Arabian Post, 25 December 2013
This analysis was inspired by themes explored at RealTimes' Dubai Office Summit 2026, where senior market participants examined the changing dynamics of Dubai's office sector. The discussion was held under a non-attribution editorial approach.
