The average Dubai broker closed three transactions last year

Dubai's property market completed 2025 in a position that would have seemed implausible five years earlier. Transactions exceeded AED 917 billion in value across more than 270,000 deals, an increase of twenty per cent on the previous year, and the investor base grew to 193,100 people, of whom 129,600 were investing in the emirate for the first time.

Against that background, the brokerage sector expanded to meet the opportunity. By the end of the year the Dubai Land Department had 32,294 registered brokers working out of 9,785 brokerage offices, having added 13,083 new brokers during the year alone. Those brokers earned AED 13.59 billion in commissions, a figure thirty-one per cent higher than the year before.

There is one further number in the same set of official figures, and it is the one that repays attention. The number of transactions executed by brokers in 2025 was 96,440.

What that arithmetic actually says

Ninety-six thousand transactions divided among thirty-two thousand brokers is an average of three transactions each, for the year. That average conceals an enormous distribution, as averages of this kind always do: a small number of brokers close a great many deals and a large number close almost none. But the shape of the distribution is the point rather than an objection to it, because it tells you what is actually scarce in this market.

It is not demand. A market that grew twenty per cent in value and attracted 129,600 new investors is not a market in which buyers are difficult to find. It is not listings either, in a city building at the rate Dubai is building. What is scarce is the ability to convert an enquiry into a viewing, and that conversion is decided in a window most brokerages have never measured.

The same research found that the odds of making contact at all fall by a factor of one hundred between the five-minute mark and the thirty-minute mark, and that they decline more than tenfold across the first hour. These findings are not specific to property, but they are unusually relevant to it, because a property enquiry in Dubai is almost never exclusive. The same buyer, looking at the same building, has typically submitted the same enquiry through three or four portal listings within the same few minutes, and those listings belong to different brokerages. The competition is not for the buyer's decision. It is for the first useful conversation.

Where the time actually goes

Ask a brokerage how long it takes to respond to a portal enquiry and the answer is usually given in hours, offered slightly defensively, and based on nobody's measurement. The more useful question is what occupies those hours, because very little of it is selling. A reasonably diligent agent handling an incoming enquiry will work through most of the following before a viewing can be proposed.

• -Establishing whether this person is already in the system. High enquiry volume across multiple portals produces constant duplication, and an agent who contacts a buyer already being worked by a colleague creates an internal problem rather than a commission.
• -Qualification. Budget, purpose, whether the purchase is financed or in cash, residency and visa position, timeline, and whether the enquirer is a buyer, a tenant, or another agent. Most of this is knowable from a short conversation, and almost none of it is knowable from the enquiry form.
• -Matching against live stock. The specific unit that generated the enquiry is frequently unavailable, already under offer, or priced differently from the listing. What the buyer needs is the three closest alternatives, and assembling those means checking availability across the brokerage's own inventory and whatever it can access elsewhere.
• -The response itself. Written, usually on WhatsApp, usually rewritten from something sent to someone else, and usually the fourth such message that buyer has received that morning.
• -The chase. Which is where most of the hours go, and which is the activity most reliably abandoned when the agent is busy with a live deal.

Only the second and third of those require a person who understands property. The first is a database question. The fourth is assembly. The fifth is scheduling. An agent who is genuinely good at selling property spends the larger part of an enquiry doing none of the thing they are good at.

The reason speed alone does not fix it

The obvious conclusion from the response-time research is that brokerages should reply faster, and a great many have reached it. The market is consequently full of automated first responses that arrive within seconds and say nothing, which buyers have learned to identify and ignore. Speed without substance is not an improvement; it simply moves the point at which the buyer disengages.

What changes the outcome is arriving first with something specific: the correct availability position on the unit enquired about, two or three genuine alternatives that fit what can be inferred about the buyer, and a question worth answering. That combination is difficult for a person to produce in five minutes across forty enquiries a day. It is not difficult to produce in five minutes if the availability check, the duplicate check and the first draft are assembled before the agent opens the conversation.

The counter-argument, fairly put

There are two honest objections to all of this, and the second is the stronger.

The first is that a large proportion of portal enquiries are not serious, and that faster handling of unserious enquiries simply consumes agent time earlier in the process rather than later. This is true, and it is why qualification matters more than speed. The purpose of a rebuilt enquiry process is not to contact everybody sooner; it is to identify within minutes which enquiries deserve an agent and which do not, and to be candid about the fact that the second group is the larger one.

The second objection is more serious. Transactions per broker is a crude measure, because the registered broker population includes a substantial number of people who are recently licensed, part-time, or effectively inactive, and dividing total transactions by that population overstates the problem for any established agency. That is a fair criticism of the average, and anyone using the figure should say so. What survives the criticism is the underlying observation: the sector added more than thirteen thousand brokers in a single year, which means competition for each enquiry intensified considerably faster than the number of enquiries grew, and in that condition the margin between winning and losing a buyer narrows to the quality of the first hour.

What I would do

• 01Measure the current position before changing anything. Take one month of portal enquiries and establish the median time to first substantive response, counted from the enquiry arriving rather than from when the agent opened it. Most brokerages discover the figure is several times what they believed.
• 02Separate the parts of enquiry handling that require property judgement from the parts that do not, and be strict about the distinction. Duplicate checking, availability confirmation, alternative matching and first-draft response are assembly. Qualification and the relationship are not.
• 03Rebuild the assembly, not the agent. The objective is that the agent opens a conversation already holding the availability position, the buyer's history with the firm, and three defensible alternatives, so that the five minutes are spent on judgement rather than on lookup.

None of this makes an indifferent agent effective, and it should not be sold as though it does. What it does is stop a capable agent from losing buyers to a faster competitor for reasons that have nothing to do with how well they sell property.