The community median is priced for the flat next door

The first number anyone reads about an address is its median ticket, and for a buyer after anything other than its dominant product that number is not wrong so much as about something else. Across the 50 pairs, the median product ticket is 1.85x its own community median. The table is the ten widest, and every one of them is a community whose reputation was set by a different product from the one in the row.

Price per sqft is supposed to be the comparable that survives a change of product, and mostly it travels better than the ticket: the median gap between a product rate and its community rate is 13%. The tail is what matters. 17 pairs are more than 25 percent away from the headline rate of their own address and 4 are more than 50 percent away, which is the difference between a fair offer and an insulting one.

The direction of the gap is not random. Villas and townhouses buy floor area that a tower cannot, so their rate lands under the community rate even where their ticket is a multiple of it: townhouses a median -11%, villas a median -0%. Duplexes and penthouses do the opposite, duplexes +5% and penthouses +7%, because what they sell on top of the floor area is height and view, and both are charged by the foot.

Hold the product still and change the address, and the products separate sharply. Duplexes run 6.1x from AED 1,371 per sqft in Jumeirah Village Circle to AED 8,336 in Palm Jumeirah. Townhouses run only 4.2x across 11 addresses, AED 1,021 to 4,294, which is as close to a commodity as this market gets: the country builds one townhouse and prices it by the land under it, while anything with a view is priced by the view. Penthouses print a tighter 1.6x, but off 4 addresses, which is a small sample rather than a market.

A benchmark is only as relevant as the weight the product carries in it. The median pair here is 20% of its community book, and the thinnest are under two percent: a handful of villas inside a community of towers, priced by a median that counted every studio in the place. These are the addresses where reading the community page instead of the product page costs the most money.

The booking deposit is the one term a buyer can compare before any negotiation, and it splits by product rather than by postcode: apartments 10%, townhouses 20%, villas 10%, duplexes 20%, penthouses 20%. The line falls between what is stacked and what has its own front door, with duplexes sitting on the ground side of it. It is not a ticket effect either: the median penthouse costs 1.9x the median villa, but the cheque it wants at booking is 3.9x as large, because the share moved as well as the price.

The share of projects already marked sold out is the closest thing to a demand reading in published data, and it lines up with the pricing, but not in the direction a discount usually points: apartments 21%, townhouses 55%, villas 44%, duplexes 17%, penthouses 7% of projects gone. The same ground product that trades under its community rate per sqft is the product clearing fastest, and the vertical product carrying a premium is the product still selling. Read together with finding three, that says the rate gap on a villa or a townhouse is a floor area effect rather than weak demand: buyers are paying less per foot because they are buying a great many more of them, and then the scheme sells out anyway.