The brochure shows you one number, and it looks like a deal: 10% on signing, the rest in instalments through construction, sometimes a slice after handover. You get in with a fraction of the capital and pay the rest as the building goes up. Put that way, the off-plan payment plan is the reason three in four residential deals in Dubai are still off-plan.
The plan isn't the problem. The problem is that the plan isn't the price.
When a client sends me the proposal they're holding, the first thing I look at isn't the entry percentage. I look at what sits around it, and almost never on the same page. Because the number they show you is real. It's the ones they don't show you that decide what getting in actually costs.
The 4% that isn't in the plan
The first is the simplest and the most forgotten: the Dubai Land Department fee, 4% of the price. It isn't optional and it isn't negotiable. On off-plan you pay it as Oqood registration when you sign the contract, within ninety days, not at handover. It's the same 4% you'd pay on a ready property, just brought forward.
The maths: on a one-million-dirham apartment, the "10% on signing" is one hundred thousand dirhams inside the plan, plus forty thousand of DLD outside it. The plan says ten. The cash says fourteen. And we haven't counted the rest yet.
The rule that changed the maths
Until eighteen months ago there was a shortcut: most banks let you fold the DLD fee and the agency commission into the mortgage, spread over the loan. Since 1 February 2025 the Central Bank has stopped that. The 4% DLD and the 2% agency are paid in cash, upfront, and the bank no longer finances them.
In practice, for anyone buying with a mortgage, the liquidity you need on completion day jumped by around 6% of the price, overnight. On a million dirhams that's sixty thousand in extra cash, on top of the down payment, the day you sign. Buyers who built their budget on the old model turn up short at exactly the moment they can't afford to.
It isn't bad news. It's a number you want to know before, not discover after.
The cost that comes back every year
The other transaction costs (registration, trustee, agency, NOC) bring the total to around 7 to 8% on top of the price. You account for those once and they're done. There's one, though, that's never done: the service charge, the annual community fee, between three and thirty dirhams per square foot depending on the building.
That range is enormous, and it's where the yield is decided. Two apartments at the same price, one with a service charge of eight and one of twenty-five per square foot, return differently every year for the life of the investment. The payment plan won't tell you, because the service charge isn't a purchase cost: it's a cost of ownership. But it's what quietly eats the gap between a good net return and a disappointing one.
Before you sign, you ask for the building's service charge and get it in writing. Every time.
When the "generous" plan is already in the price
Then there's the plan that looks like a gift: long post-handover terms, most of it paid after you have the keys, sometimes zero interest. Sometimes it's a genuine advantage. Sometimes it's a higher price dressed up as convenience.
A heavily deferred plan costs the developer, and that cost rarely vanishes: often it's already inside the list price, a few per cent above what you'd pay on a standard plan. It isn't a scam, it's financing. But if you compare two units on "how much a month," you're comparing instalments, not prices. The right question isn't how comfortable the plan is. It's what the comfort costs, and whether it's worth it.
And then there's the mechanism nobody reads until they need it: what happens if you have to exit before handover. Can you assign the contract to another buyer? On what terms, with what developer fee, with how much of your capital already locked in escrow? A payment plan without a clear way out is a plan you only half understand.
What I actually look at, before the percentage
Let me put the order back the way I read it. The real structure of the plan, not the slogan: how much before handover, how much after, on which real dates. The full cash cost on completion, DLD and fees included, with the cash rule inside the calculation. The building's annual service charge, asked for and verified. The escrow account, which protects your instalments if the project slows. And the exit, before you sign the entry.
The entry percentage is the last thing I look at, not the first. It's the one the marketing puts in front of you on purpose.
Read properly, the off-plan payment plan is still one of the best instruments Dubai offers an investor: you get in with little capital, into a project worth more at handover. The point isn't to fear it. The point is to read all of it, not just the line they show you.
If you have a proposal on the table and want to understand what getting in actually costs, before you sign, that's exactly the kind of read my clients come to me for. Send me your details: I read every message personally and reply within 24 hours.
Antonio