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Glossary

Trakheesi

Trakheesi is the Dubai Land Department system that licenses brokers and issues the permit every property advertisement must carry. Since 15 April 2023 that permit is a QR code. An advert without one is not authorised, and the fine starts at AED 50,000.

What Trakheesi actually is

Trakheesi is the system the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA), part of the Dubai Land Department (DLD), uses to run the licensed side of the property market. The name is a proper noun in every official document; DLD does not expand it.

It does three jobs. It issues and renews the licences real-estate companies operate under. It manages the cards of the brokers and employees who work for them. And it issues the permits that let those companies advertise. DLD's own guide to the system lists all three, plus the smart broker contracts that hang off it.

The permits are what a buyer meets. DLD's advertising-permit service lists fourteen categories, from newspaper, SMS and outdoor adverts through "electronic advertisements", "classified advertisements" and "real estate promotion platforms", to open-house events and project launches. A portal listing is an electronic advertisement. It needs a permit like any other.

The rule: no advert without a permit

The requirement is old and has been restated twice. RERA's Circular 11-2016 of 10 August 2016 set it; Circular 1-2020 of 17 May 2020 repeated it in these words: "properties are not to be promoted without obtaining an official permit that clearly displays the permit number on the advertisement." The same circular sets the penalty: "the value of the violation is not less than AED 50,000, and in the event of a repeat violation, the value will be doubled."

The QR code came three years later. Circular 02-2023 of 11 April 2023 announced "a new system for issuing real estate permits using Quick Response (QR) codes, accessible via the Trakheesi system", and made it binding: "Effective 15th April 2023, all real estate companies are required to include the QR code on their advertisements, whether in print or audio-visual format." It restates the fine at AED 50,000. DLD's later news refers to the code by the name Madmoun.

So a compliant Dubai listing today carries a QR code. A permit number alone was the standard before April 2023; a listing with neither is not an authorised advert, whatever the photographs show.

How to check a listing yourself

DLD runs a free verification service for exactly this, and it says the result is immediate. Its service page describes it as letting "a customer ... 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."

1. Find the permit on the advert. On a current listing it's the QR code. Scan it with your phone; it should resolve to a DLD page for that permit.
2. Or look it up directly. Open the DLD website or the Dubai REST app, choose the validation service, enter the permit details and submit. DLD's stated steps are "Log in to the website or the App and select the service", "Entering the required data and press submit", "Viewing the required information".
3. Read what comes back. A valid permit shows the licensed company and the permit it was issued against. If nothing comes back, or the details don't match the advert, treat the listing as unverified and ask the broker for the permit before you spend a weekend on viewings.

One thing you'd expect DLD to publish and it doesn't: the format of the permit number. No official page states how many digits it has or shows an example, so we don't either. The QR code and the lookup are the checks that work.

What a permit costs the advertiser

From DLD's fee schedule for the advertising-permit service: a standard permit is AED 1,000, a project-launch event permit is AED 5,000, and a AED 20 knowledge and innovation fee applies. Exhibitions are priced separately: a non-refundable preliminary booking fee of AED 10,200 and AED 1,020 per exhibitor. DLD's stated service time is one working day.

How long a permit stays valid is not stated on any DLD page we could find. Secondary sources disagree with each other, one saying a year and another tying validity to the listing period, so neither figure appears here as fact.

The fine, and how it's been enforced

Both circulars put the penalty at AED 50,000, doubled on repeat. DLD has used it. In October 2020 it reported fining ten real-estate companies and warning another thirty, with "each fine ... valued at a progressive AED 50,000", across three kinds of breach: advertising with no permit, using a manipulated or incorrect permit number, and using an expired permit.

The enforcement has since moved to software. In April 2025 DLD described an AI-enabled advertising governance platform, running since late 2024, that had "monitored over 279,000 real estate advertisements" across Property Finder, Dubizzle and Bayut, with 29% of monitored listings automatically modified. The same announcement restates that companies must display the QR codes on all advertisements. For a buyer this cuts both ways: the portals are being policed, and a listing that survives on them has been through a filter, but the obligation still sits with the advertiser, not the portal.

What Trakheesi is not

Two things get folded into it that don't belong. First, the portals. Bayut, Property Finder and Dubizzle show a permit number on each listing, and Bayut's own help pages describe agents entering it. We found no DLD or RERA rule that binds the portals themselves to display it; the obligation is on the company advertising. The portals enforce it as practice, which is useful, but it's their practice, not a regulation you can cite.

Second, the influencer "Advertiser Permit" that appeared in 2025 for sponsored social-media posts. That is a federal media-regulator instrument, not a Trakheesi or DLD permit, and it's widely conflated with the property rules. If a property post is sponsored, both regimes can apply; they are separate systems with separate regulators.

Where this comes up

Dubai communities · RERA · Start here

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