Glossary / Property

Handover

Handover is the point at which a completed off-plan unit is delivered to its buyer, the final payment falls due, the title deed is issued and the service charge begins.

It is also when the property starts being able to earn. Everything before it is outflow.

Units in a tower hand over in batches, which means several hundred near identical apartments reach the sale and rental market in the same month.

Where people get it wrong

Planning an exit within a year of handover. That is precisely when every other investor in the building is trying the same thing.

The framework behind it Off-plan versus ready sets out the rule, the arithmetic and where it breaks.

Read the framework

Related terms

Off-plan Off-plan means buying a property before it is built, paying in instalments against construction milestones and taking ownership only at handover, which in Dubai is registered through Oqood rather than an immediate title deed. Snagging Snagging is the inspection of a newly completed property to list defects for the developer to fix, carried out at or shortly before handover while the obligation to remedy them still sits with the developer. Service charge A service charge is the annual fee an apartment owner pays the owners association for maintaining shared parts of the building, quoted in Dubai as dirhams per square foot per year and levied whether or not the unit is occupied.

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