Al Wasl apartments changed hands at about AED 3,227 per square foot over the last year, which is 87% above the Dubai apartment median of roughly AED 1,730. That is the price of the postcode, and it is not the interesting number.
The interesting number is that the district's median sale price fell 5.4% over the same period while the price per square foot rose 6.4%. Both are true, they are not in tension, and the gap between them is the single most useful thing a buyer here can understand.
The average deal got smaller, not cheaper
Al Wasl sold 1,289 homes in the twelve months to late August, against 1,891 in the twelve months before. Fewer sales, and a lower median price, would ordinarily read as a district cooling off.
Then you look at what actually sold.
The median Al Wasl home shrank from 1,265 to 1,157 square feet, about 9%. Studios went from 1.4% of sales to 7.1%, five times the share. One-bedrooms climbed from 34.1% to 41.3%. Two-bedrooms, which used to be the biggest single slice at 45.4%, fell to 33.3%.
So the median price dropped because the median home dropped a bedroom, not because Al Wasl repriced. Per square foot, the thing you can actually compare, the district went up.
This is worth knowing anywhere, but it matters more in a district like this one, where a single year of new launches can move the mix hard enough to make a rising market look like a falling one on the headline number.
What each bedroom count costs here
| Apartment | Median price | Median size | Per sq ft | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | AED 1,271,000 | 395 sq ft | AED 3,235 | 92 |
| 1 bedroom | AED 2,651,000 | 794 sq ft | AED 3,221 | 533 |
| 2 bedrooms | AED 4,009,000 | 1,376 sq ft | AED 3,143 | 429 |
| 3 bedrooms | AED 8,117,000 | 2,338 sq ft | AED 3,579 | 202 |
| 4 bedrooms | AED 16,685,000 | 5,210 sq ft | AED 3,672 | 24 |
Al Wasl apartment sales in the twelve months to 27 August 2026. The per-square-foot column is flat across the small formats and steps up at three and four bedrooms.
Read down the price-per-square-foot column and something odd happens.
A studio here trades at about AED 3,235 per square foot, a one-bedroom at AED 3,221 and a two-bedroom at AED 3,143. Those are effectively the same rate. Then three-bedrooms jump to AED 3,579 and four-bedrooms to AED 3,672.
In Dubai as a whole, the pattern runs the other way: the one-bedroom is the cheapest square footage in the city and smaller units carry a premium rate. Al Wasl inverts it. Space gets more expensive per foot as you buy more of it, because the large-format stock here is a different and scarcer product rather than simply a bigger version of the same thing.
The practical consequence: in most of Dubai, sizing up buys you a better rate per foot. In Al Wasl it costs you one. A three-bedroom at AED 8.12M is not the two-bedroom at AED 4.01M with a room added, and the per-foot column is where that shows up before the brochure tells you.
The yields, computed on finished homes only
Al Wasl is 86% off-plan by sales count, which makes a yield figure easy to get wrong. An off-plan price divided by a current rent is two unrelated numbers: the unit cannot be let for years, and off-plan carries a premium anyway. So these use the 175 completed sales only, against district median rents, gross.
- One-bedroom: about 5.5% on a median ready price near AED 2.53M
- Two-bedroom: about 4.3% near AED 4.55M
- Three-bedroom: about 3.4% near AED 7.00M
The ladder is steep and it points the same way as the per-foot column: the small end of Al Wasl is the income end, and the large end is being bought for something other than yield. A one-bedroom here earns roughly 60% more on the same dirham than a three-bedroom does.
There is no studio figure in that list, and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding: the district sold 92 studios in the year, but essentially none of them were completed homes. The studio market here is almost entirely off-plan, so there is no honest ready-stock yield to quote yet.
Gross, in every case. Service charges, vacancy and management still come out of those figures, and in a district at this price point the service charge is not a rounding error. Ask for the actual figure per square foot before you model anything.
What the 86% off-plan share is telling you
Nearly nine in ten Al Wasl sales are bought from a developer rather than an existing owner. That shapes the district in three ways worth planning around.
The resale market is thin. Only 14% of transactions were owner-to-owner. If your exit assumption is selling to the next buyer rather than holding, that is a smaller pool than the headline transaction count suggests.
Most of what is for sale has not been built. The prices above are mostly contracts, not keys. Payment terms therefore matter as much as the sticker, because a slower plan changes what the purchase actually costs you per year. Current developer terms sit on our offers page.
Completed stock is the scarce thing. Those 175 ready sales are the entire finished market for a year. That scarcity is part of why the ready one-bedroom still yields 5.5% in a district trading 87% above the city rate.
Three checks before you buy in Al Wasl
Convert to price per square foot first, then compare to AED 3,227. The district median is your benchmark, not the city's AED 1,730. A unit at AED 3,000 per foot here is not cheap because it beats the Dubai number, and one at AED 3,600 is not expensive because it exceeds it. Compare like with like.
Check the size against the bedroom count. A one-bedroom here runs about 794 square feet and a two-bedroom about 1,376. Those are generous by Dubai standards, and a "two-bedroom" materially under that is a different product at a similar price.
If you are buying for income, price the ready market separately. The off-plan and finished markets here behave differently enough that a single Al Wasl average will mislead you on both. Our ROI tools will run the yield on whichever of the two you are actually buying, and the area page carries the current stock next to these figures.
For the fee side of the purchase, the transfer and registration charges are set by the Dubai Land Department, and the ownership rules that apply to non-residents are on the UAE government portal.
FAQ
How much does an apartment cost in Al Wasl?
The median Al Wasl apartment sold for about AED 3.29M in the twelve months to late August 2026, at roughly AED 3,227 per square foot. By bedroom count the medians ran near AED 1.27M for a studio, AED 2.65M for a one-bedroom, AED 4.01M for a two-bedroom and AED 8.12M for a three-bedroom.
Is Al Wasl expensive compared to the rest of Dubai?
Yes, by a wide margin on a like-for-like basis. Al Wasl apartments traded around AED 3,227 per square foot against a Dubai apartment median near AED 1,730, so roughly 87% above the city rate.
Did Al Wasl prices fall last year?
No. The median sale price fell 5.4%, but the price per square foot rose 6.4% over the same period. The median home shrank from about 1,265 to 1,157 square feet as studios and one-bedrooms took a larger share of sales, so the headline price fell while the underlying rate went up.
What rental yield does Al Wasl offer?
On finished homes, gross yields ran near 5.5% for one-bedrooms, 4.3% for two-bedrooms and 3.4% for three-bedrooms. These use completed sales only, because the district is 86% off-plan and an off-plan price over a current rent is not a yield. Service charges and vacancy still come out of these figures.
How big is a one-bedroom in Al Wasl?
About 794 square feet at the median, with two-bedrooms near 1,376 and three-bedrooms near 2,338. Those sizes sit above the Dubai medians for the same bedroom counts, which is part of what the district's price per square foot is buying.
Is Al Wasl mostly off-plan?
Yes. About 86% of sales in the last twelve months were bought from a developer rather than an existing owner, and only 14% were resales. Completed stock is genuinely scarce, which is worth factoring into both an entry plan and an exit one.
References
Figures in this article are computed from official UAE property transaction records (DLD) via Prop971 market analytics, including transactions up to 27 August 2026.
