UAE survey: transparency seen as key to rent-to-own shift

A survey of more than 2,000 home seekers in the United Arab Emirates has found that nearly half of renters would rather own a property than continue renting, a result that places fresh attention on how transparency and guidance in the property market shape whether interest in ownership turns into actual purchases.

The survey was conducted by Bayut and Dubizzle, two Dubai-based online property platforms, and drew on responses in which participants compared their rental payments with prospective mortgage payments. Around 45 per cent of renters said they had considered buying a home. That level of interest, however, did not translate into readiness to complete a purchase. Only 18 per cent of these renters said they were actively looking at buying, while a further 26 per cent said they would buy once they had saved enough for a downpayment.

The gap between interest and action is the survey’s central finding, and it is one the platforms themselves have framed as a matter of market clarity rather than demand. Prospective buyers, the survey notes, weighed affordability and initial expenses as they explored home ownership. In other words, the decision to buy was being made with close attention to the true cost of entering the market, not simply to the appeal of ownership in principle.

Among the renters who actively considered buying, 52 per cent said they wanted to settle down in the UAE, linking the purchase decision to longer-term residence rather than short-term investment. Fibha Ahmed, VP of Property Sales at Bayut and Dubizzle, said property journeys do not always fit into fixed categories. A renter today may already be planning to buy, she noted, while another may want to take that step but needs a clearer and more achievable path to ownership. What stands out, in her view, is how closely this interest is tied to people building a longer-term life in the UAE.

Ahmed also pointed to the responsibilities of the intermediaries who sit between buyers and the market. Platforms and agents, she said, have an important role to play in making the journey easier to understand, and she identified the tools for that task: transparent pricing, trusted market context and practical guidance around the true cost of buying a home. Her comments effectively set out a standard against which the industry’s conduct can be measured. If renters are hesitating because affordability and upfront costs are hard to assess, the burden of clarifying those figures falls on the platforms and agents who publish and interpret them.

The survey’s structure reinforces that reading. By asking respondents to compare rents against mortgage payments directly, the platforms treated the buy-versus-rent question as a calculation that consumers are already performing, and one whose inputs need to be visible and reliable. The finding that only a minority of interested renters are actively pursuing a purchase suggests that the calculation, as currently understood, deters more people than it converts, even among those who express a clear preference for owning.

For an audience tracking how the property market is governed and how its participants are held to the standards they set for themselves, the survey offers a useful benchmark. The stated preference of nearly half of home seekers for ownership is a measure of demand; the far smaller share actively buying is a measure of how well the market communicates its own costs. Ahmed’s remarks commit the platforms to closing that distance through transparency and practical guidance, and the survey provides a baseline against which future progress on that commitment can be judged. Whether that gap narrows in the next round of responses will be the test.