Dubai Prices Could Cool 5–10% by 2027, Says Emaar's Alabbar — Here's the Part Everyone's Skipping Past

Mohamed Alabbar doesn't do a lot of hedging. So when the founder of Emaar and Noon stood up at AIM Congress 2026 and said Dubai property prices could adjust 5 to 10 percent by 2027, it landed differently than the usual analyst caveat-stacking you get in market reports.

Here's the thing, though: the number that made headlines isn't actually the most interesting part of what he said.

What He Actually Said, in Context

Speaking at the AIM Congress in Dubai — a three-day investment conference now in its 15th year — Alabbar said he expects "a lot of supply" to hit the market by 2027, and that this would bring what he called a "nice balance" to the city. The 5-10% figure, in his framing, is the adjustment that comes with that balance settling in, not a warning sign of something breaking.

He was careful to bracket it, too: "It's an extraordinary situation," he said. "But then again, if the situation settles, God knows what will happen to this market. It could pick up really fast." That's not really the language of a developer bracing for a downturn — it's closer to someone describing a pause he expects to be temporary.

The Cancellation Numbers Are the Real Story

This is the part that got less attention than it deserved. Alabbar disclosed that Emaar's average unit cancellations rose from around 700 to 1,000 during the recent regional conflict — a real, measurable jump in buyers walking away from deals. We covered the mechanics of that period in our Iran-Israel-US war impact piece back when it was unfolding: a "wait and watch" pause is the textbook first reaction to regional uncertainty, and cancellations are one of the clearest ways that pause shows up in a developer's own numbers.

What matters more is what happened next. Once a ceasefire was announced, cancellations at Emaar didn't just stabilize — they dropped to 550, which is actually below the pre-conflict average of 700. That's a sharper snap-back than "things returned to normal." It's closer to relief buying.

96% Is the Number That Should Get the Headline

Buried in the same remarks was a statistic that says more about market health than the cancellation figures do: Emaar is still collecting close to 96% of payments that were initially delayed during the disruption. In Alabbar's words, "our customers really trust this land... they really trust our company."

Set that against the cancellation spike and a clearer picture emerges. Some buyers — likely the more speculative or recently-committed ones — walked away when things got uncertain. But the large majority of people who had already put real money down kept paying, even through a period when they had every excuse not to. That's a distinction between headline noise and underlying commitment, and it's the more useful signal for anyone trying to read this market from the outside.

Putting "5–10%" Next to the Rest of 2026

A 5-10% adjustment sounds more dramatic in isolation than it does next to the year Dubai's actually had. Q1 2026 alone brought Dh252 billion in transactions, up 31% year on year. Our own Q3 outlook already flagged the roughly 120,000 new units due for handover in 2026 as the biggest supply wave in over a decade — the same supply Alabbar is now pointing to directly as the source of this expected adjustment.

Put simply: a market that ran this hot, absorbing this much supply, giving back 5-10% of gains isn't a correction in the alarming sense. It's closer to a market taking a breath after a sprint.

What This Means for You

If you're waiting for a dramatic crash before buying in Dubai, Alabbar's own numbers don't really support that thesis — a 96% collection rate through a regional conflict isn't what a market in real trouble looks like. If you're waiting for a saner entry point after two years of records, though, this is about as direct a signal as you'll get from someone at the center of the market: expect some give-back as 2026-2027 supply lands, and treat it as the market normalizing rather than unraveling.

Weighing an entry point given all this? Talk to a Dahabi Homes consultant — we track handover schedules and pricing trends across developers in real time and can help you judge whether a specific project or area is likely to see real softening, or whether it's already priced for it.