Due diligence before an offer: known limitation 1

It assumes the documents are available and current. Where an owners association is poorly run, the budget may be late or the accounts unaudited, which is itself a finding.

Due diligence before an offer: known limitation 2

Comparable Ejari registrations tell you what was agreed, not what is achievable today, and in a moving market the two diverge.

Due diligence before an offer: known limitation 3

A physical inspection by a buyer is not a survey. For anything other than a straightforward apartment, a professional inspection is cheap against what it can find.

Playbooks / Property

Due diligence before an offer

Due diligence on a property purchase means verifying the four things that determine what you will actually earn, namely the title, the service charge and reserve position, the tenancy status, and the achievable rent, and every one of them is checkable before an offer rather than after it.

The rule

Most buyers do their thinking about a property before they see the documents, and most unpleasant surprises are in the documents. The order is fixable and it costs nothing to fix.

The four things

Title. Confirm what is actually being sold. The title deed names the owner, the unit and the area, and that area is the one the service charge is levied on and the one your price per square foot should use. Confirm whether it is freehold and whether there is a mortgage registered against it that must be discharged at transfer.

Service charge and reserves. Ask for the approved budget, the reserve fund balance and any special levies raised in the last three years. A charge that looks low for the building type is frequently a charge that is not collecting for the reserve, which is covered in the service charge and the reserve fund.

Tenancy status. Vacant or tenanted, and if tenanted, at what rent, on what expiry, and how far below the RERA index. That last number caps what you can charge next year, and rent increase caps explains why a cheaply let unit is not the opportunity it looks like.

Achievable rent. Not the asking rent and not the seller's projection. Recent Ejari registrations for comparable units in the same building.

The documents to ask for, all of which exist

Title deed. The approved owners association budget for the current year. The reserve fund statement. The last two years of accounts. The current tenancy contract and Ejari registration. A recent service charge statement showing the account is clear, since arrears will surface at the no objection certificate stage anyway.

If a seller or agent cannot produce these, that is itself information.

What to inspect

Beyond the obvious condition of the unit: the age and state of the building's plant, particularly chillers and lifts, because those are the items that produce special levies. Whether the building is chiller free or the tenant pays cooling separately, which changes what any quoted rent is worth. Water ingress in bathrooms and around balcony doors. And the view, checked against what is planned on the plots opposite rather than what is there now.

Then run the arithmetic, in this order

Price per square foot against genuine recent transactions in the same building. Then net yield using the verified service charge and the achievable rent rather than the advertised ones. Then break-even occupancy, which tells you how much vacancy the purchase survives. Then the minimum hold period, which tells you whether your intended horizon is long enough to absorb the round trip.

If all four still look right, make the offer. If any of them changed materially once real numbers replaced the marketing ones, that is the process working.

The discipline

Decide what would make you walk away before you fall in love with the unit. Write it down. The reason is the same reason the sunk cost framework exists: judgement made in advance is better than judgement made while committed.

The arithmetic

Verify, in this order 1. Title deed area, freehold status, registered mortgage 2. Service charge and reserves approved budget, reserve balance, special levies in the last 3 years 3. Tenancy vacant or let, rent, expiry, gap to the RERA index 4. Achievable rent recent Ejari registrations, same building Then calculate, in this order price per sq ft vs recent transactions, same building net yield verified charge, achievable rent break-even occupancy minimum hold period vs your intended horizon Walk-away conditions written down before viewing, not after

Where it breaks

It assumes the documents are available and current. Where an owners association is poorly run, the budget may be late or the accounts unaudited, which is itself a finding.
Comparable Ejari registrations tell you what was agreed, not what is achievable today, and in a moving market the two diverge.
A physical inspection by a buyer is not a survey. For anything other than a straightforward apartment, a professional inspection is cheap against what it can find.
It says nothing about the developer's or the association's future behaviour, which is the risk that produces levies and cannot be diligenced away.
Off-plan purchases have a different checklist entirely, since there is no building to inspect and no service charge history to read.
Time pressure from an agent is a negotiating tactic and it is most effective precisely on the buyers who have not done this work in advance.

When to use it

Before every offer, without exception, and ideally before the second viewing so the arithmetic informs the negotiation rather than following it.

Run it on your own numbers

The Net Rental Yield does this arithmetic for you, in your currency, in about thirty seconds.

Open the calculator

Sources

Last reviewed 26 August 2026. Commercial relationship disclosure: the author works in Dubai real estate brokerage. See the disclosure standards. Disclosure standards.