Method
How the numbers are made
Everything on this site comes from one public source and a short, repeatable pipeline. Nothing is estimated by hand.
1 · Data
Official Dubai Land Department sales
Every sale registered with the DLD between 1 Jan 2026 and 15 Oct 2026, downloaded from the DLD Real Estate Data page. Prices are what buyers actually paid, not asking prices from listing websites.
2 · Cleaning
129,748 transactions → 105,986 clean sales
| All sales transactions | 129,748 |
| Residential flats and villas | 111,030 |
| Real sale procedures | 107,807 |
| Bedrooms known | 107,778 |
| Realistic size and price | 107,058 |
| Without extreme price per sq ft | 105,986 |
- Only apartments and villas used as homes; offices, shops, land and hotel rooms are priced differently.
- Lease-to-own and bulk developer registrations are removed: they are not market sales.
- Realistic sizes (apartments 200–6,000 sq ft, villas 700–20,000 sq ft), price at least AED 100,000.
- The most extreme 0.5% of prices per sq ft on each side are dropped as likely entry errors.
3 · Model
Gradient boosting, tested honestly
The model learns from Jan–Aug sales and is tested on the two most recent months (Sep and Oct), which it never saw: the same situation as estimating tomorrow’s sales from today’s data. Areas are encoded by their typical price per sq ft (smoothed target encoding).
| Method | Median error | Within 10% | Within 20% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline: area median × size | 11.2% | 46% | 71% |
| Gradient boosting (this site) | 8.3% | 57% | 83% |
The 400 trees are exported to JSON and run in your browser; the pipeline checks they give exactly the same answers as scikit-learn.
4 · Limits
What this can’t tell you
- View, floor, building age, finishing and exact location inside an area all affect real prices, and none of them are in the data.
- Changes in an area’s median can reflect which projects sold (for example a new luxury tower), not only price movement.
- This is an independent student project, not affiliated with the Dubai Land Department, and not a valuation or financial advice.