Dubai Residential – Assessing Affordability – Evaluating Dubai’s Affordability Trends in an International Context

– Local Affordability Trends
Looking at Dubai in a vacuum shows that it is at least just as unaffordable as it was five years ago. This is according to two metrics: the price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios. The price-to-rent ratio is a measure that compares the cost of buying a property to the annual cost of renting it, and the price-to-income ratio compares average home prices to average incomes. While the price-to-rent ratio has been declining over the last two years, it is still higher than it was in 2020. The price-to-income ratio also looked to be improving, but saw a sharp rise in 2024 to match 2020 levels, effectively cancelling out the improvements seen in the interim.

– International Comparisons
Comparing Dubai to other major international cities returns mixed results. On the one hand, cities like Paris and Hong Kong have had consistently higher price-to-rent ratios, and New York and London have had consistently higher price-to-income ratios over the past five years. On the other hand, cities like Houston and Riyadh have been consistently more affordable, and although London had a higher price-to-rent ratio for the first eighteen months of the time period in question, Dubai has since surpassed it and been consistently higher ever since.