Dubai’s Property Boom Is Splitting Into Two Markets

Dubai’s property market has become too large to describe with a single number.

On one side sits the city’s vast off-plan machine: new launches, staged payment plans and buyers committing capital years before handover. On the other is the ready market, where completed apartments and villas can be occupied, leased and valued against a visible trading history.

Both are moving. They are not necessarily moving in the same way.

Gulf Today reported on July 24 that Dubai recorded 87,800 real-estate transactions worth AED291.7 billion during the first half of 2026. Citing analysis released by developer MERED, it said off-plan property represented 71 per cent of transactions, while average property prices increased 9 per cent over the half.

Those figures present the familiar Dubai story: buyers remain prepared to enter early, developers continue to bring major projects to market and confidence in the city’s longer-term growth has not disappeared.

Yet a daily market review published the same day by Wakhan Properties provides a useful counterweight.

Using Dubai Land Department data for transactions registered on July 23, Wakhan reported AED913.72 million in total deal value. Ready property accounted for AED505.13 million, or 55.3 per cent, while off-plan sales contributed AED408.59 million, or 44.7 per cent.

One day does not overturn a half-year trend. It does, however, show why transaction count and transaction value should not be treated as interchangeable.

Off-plan apartments can generate enormous volume because the entry price is lower, payment is spread across construction and developers release inventory in concentrated campaigns. Completed homes can produce fewer transactions but greater value, particularly when larger apartments and villas change hands.

The strongest common thread is the apartment market. Wakhan said apartments generated AED740.11 million across the ready and off-plan segments on July 23, equal to 81 per cent of total value. Villas were a secondary contributor, while commercial property and hotel apartments represented relatively modest shares.

For investors, that concentration matters. A market can be liquid in aggregate while behaving very differently by location, developer, completion status and price bracket.

There is also a discrepancy worth acknowledging. Other recent analyses based on Dubai Land Department records have produced different first-half totals, depending on whether they count all real estate, residential sales only, registrations or completed transactions. Projectory, for example, reported 79,698 residential sales worth AED227.1 billion, while other market summaries have placed total sales closer to 86,000 transactions and AED286 billion.

That does not make the market story less compelling. It makes definitions more important.

The more useful conclusion is that Dubai is not choosing between off-plan and ready property. It is supporting two sizeable markets at once.

Off-plan remains the engine of transaction volume and the clearest expression of confidence in future supply. Ready property provides immediate utility, visible rental evidence and a clearer basis for comparison. In a mature market, buyers need to understand the difference before being impressed by the headline.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.