Czech interest in Dubai property falls to a third, and follows named advisers

I advise Czech and Slovak buyers alongside British and international ones, so I measured my own market with the same method. The Czech picture is small in volume and large in character.

Czech-language searches for Dubai property ran at about 2,400 a month through the winter, spiked to 9,050 in March as the war broke and Czech readers checked the news, then fell to about 800 a month by summer, 33 per cent of the winter level, the deepest fall of the markets I measured. The vocabulary is a flat-buyer's: "byty v Dubaji", "cena bytu v Dubaji", "prodej bytu Dubaj", price and availability rather than yield.

What makes the Czech market different is who it trusts. Czech buyers search for "recenze", reviews, and "zkušenosti", experiences, and they search for advisers by name. YouTube appears in five of the twelve Czech result pages I pulled and Facebook in three. The portals, sreality and properstar, hold the listings, and a dozen small Czech agencies hold the rest. The Czech press has turned sceptical since the spring: iDNES warned that investments in the Dubai property market may be at risk, E15 reported the first price fall since the pandemic, and Ekonom wrote that Dubai is sobering up.

What I will do about it

The sceptical coverage is not wrong about the direction: the registered median price per square foot in Dubai is down 4.7 per cent since February and sales are down a quarter. It is wrong about the uniformity. The suburbs and the established mid-market held their prices; the trophy districts repriced; off-plan kept registering while resales thinned. Those distinctions are what a Czech buyer needs and what the headlines do not give, so the index and these notes will be published in Czech as well as English, under my own name, which is the way this market decides whom to believe.