Commercial Property Due Diligence: Before You Reserve

1. The title deed, read in full. Owner, area, unit type (office / retail / warehouse), tenure (freehold / usufruct / leasehold), encumbrances and any registered mortgage. The area printed on the deed decides money every year: it is the base on which the service charge is apportioned under Dubai Law No. 6 of 2019, Art. 25, which fixes each owner's share by the unit's area as recorded in the Real Property Register.

   Where: the deed itself, from the seller, cross-read against Dubai REST / DLD records; tenure appears as Property Type / Tenure. If you hear: «you'll see the deed after the reservation» — ask for the deed first. Every other check on this list reads off it.

2. The service-charge rate, and the arrears. The rate for the project is public. The debt is the deal-breaker: under Law 6/2019 Art. 32 the management entity holds a lien on each unit for unpaid service charges and «a Unit may not be disposed of unless these charges are paid» — a court can order the unit sold at public auction to recover them. Charges also cannot be levied at all without RERA's prior approval of a budget confirmed by an accredited auditor (Art. 27), and an owner cannot opt out of them, or renounce a share of the common parts to escape them (Art. 28).

   Where: the Mollak Service Charge Index, publicly searchable by community, project and usage type, plus a written clearance certificate from the management entity. If you hear: a verbal «it's all paid up» — take the clearance certificate, dated. It is the document the transfer counter reads.

3. The chiller. Who the provider is (Empower, Emicool, a building plant), what the capacity charge is, whether there are arrears, and how much contracted cooling capacity is attached to the unit. The capacity charge runs whether or not anyone is in the unit, which makes it the quiet cost of every vacancy. For a clinic, a salon or an F&B unit the contracted capacity is very often the binding constraint on what you can open.

   Where: the provider's account statement for the unit, and the building's cooling allocation schedule. If you hear: «the service charge covers cooling» — get it in writing, because in some buildings it does and in most it does not.

4. Permitted use. Whether the unit's registered designation and the municipal zoning match what you intend to do. Law 6/2019 defines a Unit as «a flat, shop, office, warehouse, floor, whole or part of a land plot», so use is fixed at register level; and under Law 33/2008 Art. 25(1)(f) using premises for a purpose other than the contracted one, or contrary to planning and land-use rules, is a ground for eviction. Converting an office to a clinic requires a Dubai Health Authority facility licence and compliance with its guidelines; to a salon, the activity on the DET licence plus Dubai Municipality permission.

   Where: the deed's unit type, Dubai Municipality zoning, and the zone authority for change of use. If you hear: «any commercial use is fine here» — the building is usually what stops you, long before the regulator does, which is check 11.

5. VAT, and the number that gates the transfer. Commercial real estate is taxed at the standard 5% on both sale and lease (FTA VAT Real Estate Guide VATGRE1 §6.2), while residential resale is exempt and a first residential supply within three years is zero-rated. On a secondary commercial sale the Special Payment Mechanism applies (VATGRE1 §6.4): the seller issues a normal tax invoice, but the buyer pays the VAT directly to the FTA before re-registration, receives a Payment Transaction Number, and must produce it at the Land Department — «without this evidence that the VAT on the purchase has been paid, the purchase of the property cannot proceed». On instalments, VAT accrues on each payment.

   Where: the FTA portal for the payment and the PTN; the seller's TRN and tax invoice. If you hear: «commercial VAT is reverse-charged, so there's nothing to pay» — that is the most common error in this market, and the mechanism is the Special Payment Mechanism. Where the unit is sold with sitting tenants to a taxable person the deal may qualify as a transfer of a going concern and fall outside the 5% — structure that with a tax adviser in advance, never claim it afterwards.

6. The lease you are inheriting. A change of owner does not end a tenancy: under Law 26/2007 Art. 28 you buy the unit together with its tenant, rate and term. If a tenant stays on after expiry without objection the contract renews automatically on the same terms (Art. 6), and terms can only be changed on 90 days' notice (Art. 14). At expiry, eviction is possible only on four grounds and only with 12 months' notice through a notary or registered post (Law 33/2008 Art. 25(2)); one of those grounds is the owner's wish to sell. Three more clauses decide what you actually hold. Leaving business premises idle for 30 consecutive days, or 90 days in a year, without good reason is itself a ground for eviction (Art. 25(1)(d)). After taking premises back «for own use» you may not let them to a third party for three years (Art. 26). And a tenant's improvements stay in the unit on exit unless the contract says otherwise (Law 26/2007 Art. 23).

   Where: the Ejari registration, the tenancy contract, the cheque schedule, the deposit receipt and the clauses allocating service charge and chiller. If you hear: «the tenant will leave when you take over» — not on that timetable: the four grounds are exhaustive and the notice is twelve months.

7. The price basis — whose number is this? A developer price list, the developer feed brokers work from, a broker asking price, a resale asking price and a sale the Land Department has recorded are five different figures for one building, and the gap between them is wide enough to re-price a deal: on one building here, the developer's launch price sits about a third below the resale floor and is still printed on the developer's own site above the words «officially sold out».

   Where: ask which of the five it is, who published it and on what date. Cross-read against DLD's registered transactions for the building. If you hear: «market price for this tower» — ask for the date and the house that published it.

8. The area basis, and whether any rate is real. Which area a quoted price covers — the deed area, the saleable area, the net internal area — and whether the price and the area belong to the same lot. If they do not, a quoted AED/ft² is invented arithmetic. It happens on live listings: among these twenty buildings, one has portals attaching «from 597 ft²» to a price while the developer's own brochure lists no office below 1,059 ft², and another's entry price belongs to a specific listing whose size is unpublished.

   Where: the deed area, the developer's plan sheet for that unit number, and a measured survey where the numbers disagree. If you hear: a per-foot rate with no unit number — ask for the unit, and the rate becomes checkable.

9. Registration, escrow and the off-plan paperwork. For off-plan, the initial sale must be registered in the interim register — DLD's «Request to register the initial sale» service, at 2% seller / 2% buyer plus knowledge and innovation fees — and instalments belong in the project's escrow account named in the sale agreement, never in a developer's operating account. Two figures in wide circulation, an «Oqood fee of AED 4,020» and «90 days to register from the contract date», do not appear in that form on DLD's own page; the fee structure it publishes is the one above.

   Where: the Oqood / interim-register entry, the SPA's escrow clause, the project's RERA registration. If you hear: instalments requested to an account other than the named escrow — ask for the escrow name in the SPA.

10. Handover terms, and evidence that anything is being built. The contractual handover date, the delivery specification, the penalty and delay provisions — and, for an off-plan building, a dated construction-progress report, which a render is not. Sold out and built are two different claims; ask which one the seller is making, and then ask for photographs with a date on them.

    Where: the SPA, the developer's progress reporting, the RERA project record. If you hear: a handover quarter that differs between the brochure, the portals and the founder's statements — ask for the date in the SPA, which is the one that binds.

11. The building's physics, against your actual scenario. DEWA capacity, extraction, drainage, floor-to-ceiling height, goods lift, waste route, access hours — and the management company's consent for each alteration. The building, not the regulator, is usually what makes converting an office into a clinic, a salon or a café impossible. Approvals depend on the zone (Municipality, free-zone authority, DCD) more than on the type of work, and the fit-out is a real number: 200–550 AED/ft² for a basic specification across three independent Dubai price lists in 2026, with a 40–60% uplift when you start from shell & core, and 2–5% of the budget for approvals.

    Where: the building's MEP documentation, the management company's fit-out guide, and a contractor's survey taken before the reservation. If you hear: «any fit-out is possible» — ask for the riser and drainage drawings and a contractor's survey.

12. Parking, as written in the deed. How many bays are attached to the unit in the title deed — «there is parking in the building» is not an answer — whether visitor bays exist, whether they are paid, and who controls them. In strata podium projects this is a recurring hidden shortage, and parking in central locations runs AED 800–1,500 per bay per month. Dubai Municipality's parking-provision standards sit in no open source, so a ratio quoted at you is the seller's claim until the deed confirms it.

    Where: the deed's parking schedule and the management company's allocation register. If you hear: a bay «assigned informally» by the previous owner — ask for the deed's parking schedule.

One question sits underneath half of that list: is the building single-owner or strata? A single owner controls the tenant mix and the maintenance standard, and you get no vote in either. Strata gives you a title and a voice, and it brings the risks of a committee with it.

Dubai's framework since Law No. 6 of 2019 is specific about who runs a jointly owned building, and it is no longer the old owners' association. Projects fall into three categories (Art. 20): major projects, hotel projects — where management passes to a hotel project management company and the owners' committee takes no part in management at all — and everything else, managed by a specialised management company selected and contracted by RERA, with an Owners Committee whose members RERA appoints. The committee is formed once at least 10% of units are registered, and a member must be current on their own service charges. The developer pays charges on unsold units, and may sit on the committee only while it holds them. A master developer may also levy usage charges for master-community common parts — on completed buildings, buildings under construction and empty plots alike (Art. 26). And the developer and the management entity are both barred from blocking your access to the unit or the common parts to force payment (Art. 29).

So ask who the management entity is, whether the RERA budget is approved and auditor-confirmed, whether an Owners Committee exists, and what the dispute history looks like. Retail brings a harder set again: tenant mix, anchor tenant and mall marketing all sit outside your control, extraction, grease traps, signage and opening hours need the management entity's consent, and liquidity is thinner than an apartment at the same price. Retail Investment: Footfall, Tenant Quality & Lease Risk is the piece for that.

Budget these separately from the headline figure, because together they are material:

• DLD transfer: 2% seller + 2% buyer, plus AED 250 for the title deed, AED 225 for the unified map, AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation, plus a trustee fee of AED 4,000 + VAT on deals of AED 500,000 and above (AED 2,000 + VAT below). Checked on DLD's own service pages, 10 August 2026. The tariff is not «4% from the buyer» — that is market convention, and in a commercial deal the seller's 2% is negotiable. Few buyers try.
• VAT 5%, per check 5 — and on a secondary purchase, paid before you own anything.
• Broker commission: 2% plus 5% VAT on the commission is the market standard. The percentage is contractual: RERA licenses brokers and requires forms A/B/I, and no official instrument fixes the 2%.
• Developer NOC on a resale — priced by the developer, roughly AED 500–5,000+ across the market, sometimes conditional on service charges being clear, with no published market-wide tariff.
• Mortgage registration, if financed: 0.25% of the loan plus AED 250 for the deed plus knowledge and innovation fees, with a trustee fee of AED 4,000 + VAT (AED 5,000 + VAT on a provisional / Oqood registration). The widely quoted «0.25% + AED 290» does not match DLD's own page.
• Annual costs: service charge on the registered area, the chiller capacity charge whether or not the unit is let, and DEWA. There is no property tax and no capital-gains tax in the UAE.

Two financing facts change the plan itself. Commercial lending sits outside the UAE Central Bank's LTV regulation, which covers residential property by definition — so the bank sets the terms, and the published corridor is 60–75% LTV over 10–15 years. And the documented lenders lend on completed property: Emirates NBD publishes 70% for UAE nationals and 60% for expatriates up to AED 7M over up to 15 years, for ready freehold or transferable assets. No published mortgage product exists for an off-plan office. Most banks run the product through business banking and underwrite the company, not the salary — one requires four years of trading history and AED 20–250M of turnover. For an individual investor the open doors are few, so plan an off-plan commercial purchase as cash unless a lender has said otherwise in writing.

On tax, the fact that most often surprises: an individual's real-estate investment income sits outside UAE corporate tax regardless of the amount, as long as the activity needs no licence and is not run through one. That is Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023, Art. 2(2), sub-paragraph c, with FTA guide CTGTNP1 §3.8.3 and Example 15, and §6.1 Case 5, which also confirms no registration obligation. A company pays 0% to AED 375,000 of taxable profit and 9% above it. For a pure rental strategy the individual is often the cheaper holder — the opposite of the standard advice. A free-zone structure is a narrower question and one for a tax adviser: the relief there is tied to commercial property inside the zone and to transactions with businesses.

Three things to establish before reserving, and two of the figures everyone quotes are not norms at all.

A mainland trade licence needs a physical office with a registered Ejari, and an owner occupying their own unit registers a tenancy to themselves or their company — DLD's Ejari service explicitly lists companies among its users. A free-zone licence needs an address inside that zone: a DMCC licence in JLT, a DIFC licence in DIFC. A purchased unit works for this where the deed's unit type is office; DMCC's own requirements are understood to accept a title deed in place of a lease on that condition.

Now the two figures. A minimum office area of about 200 ft² for a mainland licence, and a visa quota of one visa per 9 m² of Ejari-registered space, are both market practice, confirmed on no DET, GDRFA or MOHRE page. Free zones count differently again — quota follows the package, with a flexi-desk typically carrying one to three visas. Your own quota is settled in the system at the time of application, which is the moment to confirm it.

The last question is the one that matters if anything goes wrong, and it is answered in market-level numbers instead of documents. Dubai's record office year, 2025, saw about 4,600 office transactions in total — against tens of thousands of apartment sales. The total stock advertised for sale citywide on 10 August 2026 was 2,084 offices on one major portal. The average office ticket in 2026 to 19 May was AED 6.41M, up from AED 3.0M.

Two consequences. Valuation evidence is thin, because comparable sales in a given building may not exist — in the cheapest segment of the market, all sixteen Dubai offices listed below AED 500,000 on 10 August 2026 were in a single building, and an entire district's stock (Dubai Investments Park) is one business park. And re-letting takes longer than for a home: an office tenant searches for months, not weeks, which is why a one-month vacancy assumption in a yield model is optimistic. Before buying, ask how many units in this building have resold in the last twelve months, and at what.

Run the list against the twenty commercial buildings on sale here today and this is what comes back:

• Every one is off-plan or building out. Fourteen are off-plan; five are under construction, AHS Tower among them as a facade redevelopment; and on Richmond District the stage is unsettled, because its office tower and its retail podium are both still unreleased. Check 10 therefore has an open item on all twenty: a dated, published construction-progress report exists for none of them, so ask the developer for site photographs with a date on them.
• AHS Tower has an open item at check 7. Three prices circulate — a historic AED 12M launch entry unavailable since 24 February 2026, no current primary price after the developer announced the tower sold out during development, and the third-party resale asking range of AED 15.95M–44.9M with its date. Nobody agrees on the acquisition date, the seller's identity or the storey count either.
• Eaton Square has open items at checks 7 and 9. Whether primary stock remains is unsettled, because no developer price list has been published; and the portals disagree on who is building it.
• Binghatti Spectre has an open item at check 8. The portals attach «from 597 ft²» to the office price; the office areas in Binghatti's own office brochure are 1,059.60 / 1,072.84 / 1,094.15 ft². At 597 ft² and at 1,059 ft² it is a different purchase. The payment schedule and the handover date are both absent from Binghatti's three official PDFs for this tower, and the sale agreement settles them.
• Lumena passes check 7 once you know which price is which: the AED 19M launch figure is still printed on the developer's own site above the words «officially sold out», and the transactable entry is the resale floor of AED 25.1M from twelve live listings on 13 August 2026.
• Haus of Tenet is one of the cleanest records of the twenty — one entry price corroborated across IRTH's material and six independent channels, three office lines with published ranges, a consistent plan and handover — with two limits: no per-typology developer price list, and an 8–10% return that is a forecast, not a guarantee.
• Eight of the twenty have a plot coordinate three independent sources agree on. For the other twelve — Lumena and Eaton Square among them — the exact plot comes from the developer on request, worth asking before you pay for a view.

None of that makes these bad assets. It puts the open questions on the table before you reserve instead of after.

• Ask Mollak for your own building's service charge. Dubai publishes no office service-charge index, so every office figure in circulation is a Mollak residential or mixed-use proxy — median about 17 AED/ft²/year, with 20–40 quoted for premium commercial towers. The rate for your building is public in Mollak, per project, and that one lookup replaces the whole estimate.
• Take the utility tariffs from the provider. Commercial fils/kWh rates, water rates, the fuel surcharge and the cooling tariff all sit behind DEWA's and the district-cooling providers' own pages. Use the provider's PDF, or an actual bill for the building.
• Treat three regulatory figures as practice: the 1-visa-per-9 m² quota, the ~200 ft² minimum office area for a mainland licence, and the 2% broker commission. None is confirmed on a regulator's page, so each is settled in your own application or your own contract.
• For a commercial rent increase, go to the Rental Disputes Centre. The right exists and the calculator does not: Decree No. 43 of 2013 speaks of Real Property and applies to all landlords including free zones and DIFC, and the Law 33/2008 definition of Real Property covers leases for commercial activity — but DLD's Smart Rental Index, launched 2 January 2025, covers residential areas only, with commercial and industrial indices announced as future work.

Read next: Dubai Commercial Property Investment Guide — the umbrella piece, if you arrived here first and want the market before the mechanics. The district picture is Dubai Office Districts: A Map-Led Investment Guide, the net-return arithmetic is Commercial vs Residential, and the two district guides are Business Bay Offices and Sheikh Zayed Road Offices: Freehold Since 2025. All twenty buildings, with their commercial prices and the basis behind each, are on the commercial section.