A legitimate off-plan project in Dubai will pass five checks you can run yourself before signing anything. A project that fails even one of them deserves a harder look before it gets your deposit. None of the five requires a lawyer, a translator, or specialist knowledge — each one requires asking a direct question and looking closely at what comes back.
Off-plan buying in Dubai is well protected on paper. The regulation exists, the escrow requirement exists, the advertising-permit system exists. What varies enormously, project to project, is whether any of it is actually being followed — and a buyer who only reads the brochure has no way of telling the difference. These five questions are how you tell it from the outside, before you have committed anything.
The permit that should already be on the advert
Every legitimate property advertisement in Dubai — on a portal, on Instagram, in a printed brochure — carries a Trakheesi permit number issued by the Dubai Land Department specifically for that listing. It is not a general trade-licence number, and it is not optional. A firm advertising a Dubai property without one is skipping the single easiest compliance step that exists, which tells you something about how carefully everything downstream of the advert has probably been handled too.
The number should be visible on the advert itself, and it should correspond to a real, currently valid permit for that specific unit — not a permit for a different listing, and not the agency’s general registration. If it isn’t there, or the person selling you the unit can’t produce it when you ask, that is the fastest disqualifier available to you, and it comes before you’ve asked a single question about the building itself.
An escrow account, named — not described
Off-plan payments in Dubai are required by law to sit in a project-specific escrow account, held at an approved bank, kept separate from the developer’s own operating funds. That protection exists. On its own, though, it isn’t the question worth asking, because almost every sales conversation will confirm that an escrow account is used.
The real question is narrower: does your contract name the actual account — which bank, which project reference — or does it only describe escrow as a concept, in the abstract, without telling you where your money is actually going. “We use an escrow account” is a different undertaking from a contract that names one. Ask for the account details in writing before you transfer anything, and treat a vague or delayed answer to that specific question as information in itself.
What your payments are actually tied to
A developer can only draw funds out of escrow against construction progress that has been independently certified — not against the calendar. That is the mechanism the protection relies on: money is released to the developer when the building visibly moves forward, not simply because a date has arrived.
Your own payment plan is worth checking against that same logic. Ask directly whether your instalments are tied to verified construction milestones, or to fixed dates on a schedule regardless of what has actually been built by then. A calendar-based plan is not automatically a bad sign — plenty of legitimate projects are sold this way — but it shifts more of the delivery risk onto you, and it is worth knowing which arrangement you have agreed to before you are several payments into it.
Look at what they have already handed over
A render shows what a developer intends to build. A completed, occupied building shows what they actually deliver, and the two are not always the same project. Before committing to a building still under construction, look at the same developer’s most recent completed handover — not the marketing photography of it, but the building as it stands today: the finish quality in the corridors and common areas, whether the amenities shown in the brochure actually opened, and whether handover happened close to the date originally quoted rather than long after it.
A developer with a consistent record of building what they said, close to the timeline they said, is a materially different proposition from one whose only evidence is a sales gallery and a set of renders. This is checkable in an afternoon — in person, or through people who have already bought from the same developer.
What is written down about delay
Every sale and purchase agreement addresses what happens if handover slips. What varies enormously, contract to contract, is how — and that difference tends to matter far more than buyers expect, right up until it is their delay. What you are told in a sales conversation about delay risk is not the operative fact. The contract clause is.
Two things are worth reading closely before you sign anything: whether there is a grace period the developer is allowed before a delay counts as a breach of contract, and what your actual options are once that period has passed. Have someone read that clause who is not the person selling you the unit.
Run the checks before you run the numbers
None of these five checks require inside knowledge, and a legitimate project will not make any of them difficult to complete. A project that resists even one of them — a permit nobody can produce, an escrow account nobody will name, a delay clause nobody wants to discuss — is telling you something before you have paid it a single dirham.
Once a project clears these five, the arithmetic is the easier part. Our cost-of-buying calculator and yield calculator work through what a specific unit will actually cost you to acquire and what it might return, using your own numbers rather than a headline figure — both linked from our tools page. For the fuller walkthrough of how an off-plan purchase proceeds step by step, we have written that up separately, alongside a look at what a purchase costs beyond the advertised price and how to weigh resale against off-plan for your particular situation.
If you are weighing a specific project and want to work through what its permit, its escrow structure and its developer’s track record actually say, arrange a consultation with our advisory team before you sign anything.