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How to pick between Dubai's neighbourhoods

69 areas is a lot to scroll through. Most people don't need 69. They need about five, and the five change depending on whether you're buying to live in or buying to rent out. So here's the short version of how we'd narrow it down.

Where the money goes first

These are the areas we get asked about most, and roughly what you're looking at:

• JVC is the volume play. Small units, high turnover, and yields hold up because tenants keep coming. Listed from AED 400K. We have 26 listings there, more than anywhere else on this page.
• Business Bay is walkable to Downtown without Downtown pricing. Lots of towers, so quality swings a lot building to building. Listed from AED 954K.
• Dubai Hills has villas, parks, a golf course and an actual mall. Families end up here. Listed from AED 774K.
• Dubai Marina is older stock now, but the location does not get worse. Listed from AED 1.9M.
• Palm Jumeirah is the address play. Yields are lower and everyone who buys there knows it. Listed from AED 4.9M.
• Dubailand and JVT sit in the middle. Cheaper than Marina, newer than JVC, further from everything.

The tradeoff nobody spells out

Rental yield and lifestyle pull in opposite directions in Dubai. Almost every time.

The areas that rent best are the ones with small units, lots of supply and tenants who move every year. JVC. Arjan. Dubai South. You'll see strong numbers on paper. You probably wouldn't live there yourself.

The areas people actually want to live in, Palm Jumeirah, Emirates Hills, Jumeirah Bay, do the opposite. Lower yield, slower to rent, but the capital side has held up better over twenty years than anything else in the city.

Neither is wrong. They're just different jobs. Problem is a lot of buyers pick an area for lifestyle reasons and then get annoyed when the yield looks thin, or buy purely on yield and then never want to visit the thing they own.

Decide which one you're doing first. The area list gets short fast after that.

Questions worth asking before you commit

Whatever you shortlist, check these:

1. 1.What's the service charge per square foot? In some towers it quietly eats a full point of yield.
2. 2.How much new supply is being handed over in that area in the next 24 months?
3. 3.Is it freehold, and does the building have its own community rules that limit short term rentals?
4. 4.What's the actual commute, driven at 8am on a Tuesday, not measured on a map?
5. 5.How old is the building, and has the chiller system been replaced?
6. 6.What did the last three units in that exact building sell for? Not the area average. The building.

That last one catches people out constantly. Two towers on the same street can be twenty percent apart on price per square foot, and the area page will never tell you that.

Where to start

If you already know the area, open its page and look at what's listed. If you don't, work backwards from budget and lifestyle instead of from a map.

And if you want the version that isn't on any website, the buildings we'd avoid and the ones we'd buy in tomorrow, just ask. Our brokers live in these neighbourhoods. Most of them have rented in three or four of them.