Every time there is doubt, something is repriced. This year, it is repricing conviction in the UAE, separating purchasers who are eager to take over from owners who want to sell.
Dubai’s real estate sector was disrupted but not destroyed by the regional turmoil earlier in 2026. As buyers shifted to the sidelines, apartment prices sagged by around 3%, and some investors, shaken by the conflict, started looking to sell their UAE assets, transaction volumes dropped by about 25%. Such dislocation seldom lasts, and when it does, it benefits the person in a position to relocate.
RD Dubai’s co-founder, Lukas Kerrebijn, has set the company up for success. However, he is adamant about what did not change before describing what did.
The UAE and Dubai’s long-term situation is exactly the same as it was prior to the conflict. The value proposition, which is based on zero tax on rental and personal income, rental yields close to 7%, deep liquidity, and a safe-haven status that the market has rebuilt after each previous crisis, still outweighs the options that a foreign investor may consider in Europe. That hasn’t moved at all. Since Kerrebijn has always seen real estate as a long-term endeavor, the current disruption is only a blip rather than a turning point. Everything tactical that follows sits inside that unchanged thesis rather than replacing it.
The short-term strategy is the only thing that has altered.
This strategy now focuses on distressed and off-market transactions, looking for owners who are prepared to sell for less because they want to get out. RD’s own book is the most lucid example. The company paid 2.65 million dirhams for a Business Bay property that a developer had initially sold for 4.5 million dirhams, nearly two million less than the asking price—in a well-known Dubai neighborhood that Kerrebijn had every reason to believe. He has made it clear that he still thought it was a good deal and would have purchased it for $3 or $3.2 million. Finding it over two million less was a result of bargaining and network, not chance.
Location is the second strategic adjustment.
Kerrebijn has shifted the company’s emphasis from undeveloped districts to well-established ones. While a project on the periphery depends on a future that a concerned market may postpone, an established site maintains its worth through a downturn because the demand for it is already present. When RD does venture beyond the core, it only does so at prices that make up for the increased risk. Location and cost are the deciding factors, not the state of building. Both a finished building and an off-plan apartment can make sense in the appropriate location at the correct entrance point.
Abu Dhabi adopts a similar perspective. Building on a 2025 that saw a strong increase in transaction values, the capital’s market has been remarkably busy. RD has leaned in and secured prime units in Sobha City, the developer’s first master community in the emirate, at Al Bahiya.
The strategies are novel. The conviction that lies beneath them is not. Kerrebijn responded to Dubai’s moment of doubt by going shopping rather than exercising prudence because a dislocated market only offered him a less expensive way to act on a thesis he already held.
