Dubai shops are up 197% and hotel rooms are up 7%
Commercial property gets discussed as a single asset class. The official index shows a spread wide enough to make that meaningless.
Dubai's Commercial Property Price Index stood at 186.20 at the end of 2025, against a 2019 base of 100. Commercial property, as a category, is up about 86%.
The category is doing so much work in that sentence that it is close to useless.
The spread
2025 Q4, against a 2019 base of 100.
| Segment | Index | Change since 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| Shops | 296.61 | +196.6% |
| Shops and offices | 252.61 | +152.6% |
| Offices | 237.93 | +137.9% |
| General index | 186.20 | +86.2% |
| Hotel apartments | 164.64 | +64.6% |
| Hospitality | 144.16 | +44.2% |
| Hotel rooms | 106.67 | +6.7% |
Shops have nearly tripled. Hotel rooms have moved less in six years than a decent savings account, and the segment has spent much of the period below its 2019 level: 93.83 at the end of 2022, and it did not clear base convincingly until 2023.
There is no meaningful sense in which these are the same investment.
Offices are the story nobody tells
The office index bottomed at 88.92 in 2020 Q2, when the working-from-home argument was at its loudest and Dubai office space looked structurally impaired.
From that trough it has risen to 237.93. That is +167% from the bottom, and it has risen in almost every quarter since 2023.
Offices are up more over six years than the residential general index, and almost as much as villas, while receiving a fraction of the attention. Whatever consensus existed in 2020 about the future of offices was, in Dubai, wrong.
Hotel rooms are the counterexample worth keeping
It is the segment that makes the rest of the data honest.
Dubai's tourism performance over this period was strong. Hotel room prices went essentially nowhere: 100.30 at the end of 2020, 93.83 at the end of 2022, 106.67 at the end of 2025.
Strong demand for a service does not automatically mean capital appreciation in the asset that provides it. Rooms are supplied at scale by operators who can add more of them, which caps the price the way villa scarcity does the opposite.
Anyone reasoning "Dubai is busy, therefore hospitality property must be rising" should sit with that line for a moment.
Two warnings about this data
Shops are volatile. The series runs 296.23 in 2025 Q1, then 274.59, then 265.07, then 296.61. Swings of that size quarter to quarter suggest thin transaction volumes, where a few unusual deals move the index. Treat the level as indicative and the quarter-to-quarter movement as noise.
These are prices, not returns. Commercial property is bought for income. Lease length, tenant quality, void periods and service charges decide what you actually earn, and none of them are in this index. A segment can rise 197% and still be a poor investment if it sits empty.
Method
Dubai Statistics Center, Commercial Property Price Index, base year 2019, published April 2026. Segment names are as published. Figures derived by a script kept with this site.