The buildings finish in one year and the money is due in another

Take the two cumulative curves over the same horizon. Half of all the non-reservation money on this calendar has been called by Q4 2027. Half the buildings have completed by Q4 2027. 2027 is the heaviest year for cash at AED 45.68B, 32.8% of everything due, and 2027 is the heaviest year for completions at 568 projects. A buyer planning against the completion calendar is planning against the wrong number, and so is a developer reading a pipeline chart as a demand forecast.

The last column of the table makes the same point crudely: money due per building handed over falls steadily across the horizon, from AED 137.1M in 2026 to a fraction of it by the end. The far years are still selling their construction phase. The near years are settling.

This is a count, not a valuation, so it survives every assumption in the method. Of the 602 projects with a payment falling in Q1 2029, 303 of them, 50.3%, have already handed over. They are collecting a post-handover tail from buyers who have the keys, a service charge bill and, in many cases, a tenant. From that quarter onwards the majority of the market’s remaining off-plan obligation is attached to finished buildings, and it stays that way for 14 quarters to the end of the horizon.

The heaviest single collision is Q4 2029: AED 4.91B of handover payments from 65 buildings completing that quarter, landing on AED 724.6M of instalments still running from buildings delivered up to three years earlier. Read as one number that is AED 6.38B due in three months. Read as two calendars it is a completion wave and a legacy tail that happen to coincide, and only one of them is visible on any pipeline chart published in this market.

A post-handover tail is the cheapest thing in a plan to advertise and the longest-lived obligation in it. At market level it is a rounding error: 5.9% of the committed calendar, carried by the 22.4% of projects that publish one, against 39.0% for the handover payment itself and 55.0% for everything due before a key exists.

At the far end of the calendar it is nearly everything. From Q1 2031 onwards, 95 percent or more of every quarter is tail money, and by Q2 2032 it is 99 percent. AED 826.1M of tail money runs past the end of the horizon entirely. That is the asymmetry a buyer signs: the tail is worth a real discount in present value, which the plan discount work prices, and it is also a liability that outlives the sales office.

Dubai South is the most concentrated address on this calendar. 64.3% of its whole committed schedule, AED 5.70B of AED 8.87B, falls in Q4 2026, across 92 tracked projects. Read on its own that is a striking claim about a community.

It is mostly a claim about Azizi Venice. That single project is 81 percent of the peak quarter. Give every project in the community one median-priced unit instead of every unit record we hold for it, and the same quarter falls to 28.7%. The concentration is real for anyone exposed to that building. It is not a fact about the postcode.

The same reading applies to developers. Azizi shows 51.8% of its book in Q4 2026 across 36 projects, of which 82 percent is Azizi Venice, and 43.2% on the per-project basis. Concentration in this market is usually one tower, and a table that does not say so is selling a pattern that is not there.

This is the finding about our own number, and it belongs in the article rather than in a method note. The calendar weights a project by how many priced unit records were published for it, which is the only value basis this corpus can audit. It is also a scrape artefact: the median included project carries 10 unit records and the largest carries thousands, so a tower with a deep listing outweighs eighty small projects that were listed as three unit types each.

So every group is computed twice. On the record base and again with one median-priced unit per project, where a deep listing buys nothing. Across the 51 published communities the peak-quarter share falls by a median of -0.1 points between the two, 2 of them fall by twenty points or more, and only 10 hold a peak share of a quarter or better in the same quarter on both bases. Those 10 are the ones worth a sentence.

What does survive is the shape of the market calendar itself. The two bases agree on the quarterly share of the total at a correlation of 0.989. The timing of the market’s cash is a property of the schedules developers publish. The size of any one group’s share of it is a property of how deeply that group was listed, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Dubai carries AED 129.91B of the committed calendar across 1,322 projects and peaks in Q3 2026. The northern emirates peak later, because their books are newer: Abu Dhabi in Q2 2029, Ras Al Khaimah in Q4 2028, Umm Al Quwain in Q3 2026, Sharjah in Q4 2028, Ajman in Q4 2027. That is not a forecast about any of them, it is where their published schedules land.

The difference that matters to a buyer is the share of a book that runs after the keys. Ajman carries 39.3% of its calendar after handover, against 1.9% for Umm Al Quwain. Deferral is an emirate-level policy as much as a developer-level one.

All of the above is aggregate. A buyer does not hold the market, they hold two or three units, and the month that hurts is the one where a handover payment on one lands on top of a construction instalment on another. Every calculator in this market, ours included until now, models exactly one unit, which is precisely the case where the problem does not exist.

So the same arithmetic runs on your own list. Pick two or three real projects in the combined payment calendar, put your own purchase price against each, and it lays the published schedules on one timeline, names the heaviest month and the heaviest quarter, and counts the months in which more than one of them wants money. 1,659 projects are pickable: every tracked project with a stated future handover date, a payment plan that sums, and a published price.