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Glossary

DLD

DLD is the Dubai Land Department, founded in January 1960 and, by law, the only body that can register a property right in the emirate. Every sale, deed, mortgage and valuation runs through it. Its regulator, RERA, sits inside it. The 4% transfer fee is its best-known charge.

What DLD is

DLD's own history: "HH Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum ... inaugurated the Land and Property Department on January 23, 1960." Its Arabic name is دائرة الأراضي والأملاك. Its current mandate comes from Law No. (7) of 2013 Concerning the Land Department, and its monopoly on the register from Law No. (7) of 2006 Concerning Real Property Registration, Article 6: "The Department will be the only entity authorised to register Real Property Rights and long-term leasehold contracts". Article 7 gives that register its weight: "This Property Register will have absolute evidentiary value against all parties and the validity of its data may not be impugned unless it is proven to be the result of fraud or forgery."

The Director General is Omar Bu Shehab; the Chairman is Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Maktoum, both per DLD's management page. The people a buyer actually meets are rarely DLD staff. They are the registration trustees, private firms DLD licenses to execute its transactions, which is why "going to DLD" usually means going to an office with a different name on the door.

What sits inside it

RERA, the Real Estate Regulatory Agency, created by Law No. 16 of 2007 and now governed by Law No. 4 of 2019, which makes it "affiliated to the DLD". RERA licenses brokers and developers, approves service-charge budgets through Mollak, and issues advertising permits through Trakheesi.

The Rental Disputes Centre, established by Decree No. 26 of 2013, which describes itself as "an integrated judicial system" for landlord-tenant disputes. It is a court, not a counter, and it has its own website.

A promotion and investment management sector, the arm behind investor-facing campaigns. DLD named it in a 2020 release; we found no 2026 page restating the name, so treat the label as dated.

What a buyer pays DLD

The 2% and 2% is the "4% DLD fee". Executive Council Resolution No. 30 of 2013, Article 3: "unless agreed otherwise, the Fee for the sale of Real Property will be shared equally by the seller and purchaser." In practice most contracts move the seller's half to the buyer.

Two cautions. The "AED 580 admin fee" that appears on broker sites is not a DLD line item; the official add-ons are the AED 250 deed, the map fee and the AED 20, which total between AED 370 and AED 520 depending on property type. And DLD's Golden Visa page, still live and dated 23 September 2026, describes a DLD-run service even though DLD and GDRFA signed a memorandum on 11 April 2026 moving "the Golden Residency, the Retiree Residency, and the Property Residency" into GDRFA's system. Both facts are true today; the page has not caught up with the memorandum.

DLD online, and who else wears the badge

The official site is dubailand.gov.ae. The transactional channel is Dubai REST, "the smart real estate platform for real estate services, through which all real estate services performed by property owners, tenants, real estate brokers, developers, real estate valuators, investors and all beneficiaries of the real estate market" are carried out. Title deeds, valuations, project status, broker lookups and service-charge indexes all live in it.

Two names look official and are private. DLD Cube describes itself as "an integrated customer service center to provide exceptional services to real estate investors" and is operated by a licensed service provider, not by DLD. The registration trustees are about seventeen private companies on DLD's own list, licensed to execute DLD transactions in their own offices and hours. Both are legitimate channels. Neither is the department, and their service fees are theirs.

What a DLD licence is

Real-estate companies, brokers, developers and valuers operate under licences and permits DLD issues through the Trakheesi system. DLD runs a free check: the service "allows a customer to verify the e-copy of the licenses and permits issued by the Land Department for all real estate activities practitioners in the Emirate of Dubai via Trakheesi system", on the DLD website or in Dubai REST, immediately. If a broker cannot show a licence that passes that check, they are not licensed.

The market it registers

DLD's most recent published figure, dated 9 April 2026: "total transactions reaching AED252 billion, marking a 31% year-on-year increase in value and a 6% rise in volume" in the first quarter of 2026, with "718,160 real estate procedures" of which "60,303 were real estate transactions". The full-year 2025 total that circulates in the press, around AED 917 billion, is not on a DLD page we could find, so we don't repeat it as DLD's number.

Since March 2025 DLD has also run a tokenisation pilot with the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, describing itself as "the first real estate registration entity in the Middle East to adopt blockchain-based tokenization". It is a separate programme from the ordinary register.

Where this comes up

RERA · Title deed · Trakheesi

Frequently Asked Questions

This entry is part of the Home Guide Dubai glossary - the vocabulary a Dubai buyer or Golden Visa applicant actually meets, defined in plain English and kept consistent with our verified guides.