How to work with Property Finder?

What is Property Finder?

Property Finder is a free and leading real estate portal in the Middle East and North Africa that helps buyers, renters and investors find their ideal homes and commercial properties. It is similar to our own Funda. Founded in 2007 and based in Dubai, Property Finder provides a platform where users can browse through thousands of real estate listings ranging from apartments and villas to offices and stores. The portal continues to expand, recently integrating a simple mortgage calculator. The portal can be found at the following link: https://www.propertyfinder.ae/

The platform works with real estate agents, developers and owners to promote their properties and offers a wide range of search options. This allows users to easily filter by criteria, such as location, price and amenities. In addition, Property Finder also includes market information and analysis, which are useful for people who want more insight into real estate trends and prices in different areas.

The platform operates in multiple countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and Bahrain. It has emerged as a trusted source for real estate information and transactions in the region.

Advertisement problems

On Property Finder you will find countless housing ads, some more beautiful than others. However, not all ads are real. We distinguish between three sectors: the existing construction sector, the new construction sector and the rental sector.

1. Existing construction sector: There are many ads online of homes that are not actually for sale.This is a trick of shrewd real estate agents to get contact information. After all, if you show interest in such a property, they know your budget and can present you with something else that is actually on the market. The same trick is played by placing ads of homes with surreal, often way too low, prices. In this case, you think you have found a gem and leave your contact information. The broker will contact you saying that the property is currently “no longer available,” but knows your budget as of now. The United Arab Emirates government indicated early this year that it was going to crack down on these “Ghost ads” and many fines have since been issued. Of course, these “Ghost ads” can never be completely eliminated, which is why they can still be found on Property Finder.

2. New construction sector: When a new project launches in the United Arab Emirates, every real estate agent has the right to place an ad about it on Property Finder. Thus, you will often see the same projects passing by more than 100 times. These ads are currently allowed to remain even if the project is already sold out. Realtors deliberately leave these ads up, as this way they again have a greater chance of finding out your budget and contact information. If you express interest in a sold-out project you will be presented with something else. Because these ads are allowed to remain, the supply in the new construction sector in the United Arab Emirates seems even larger than it is, leaving many people unable to see the forest for the trees.

3. Rental sector: the rental sector currently presents the most difficulties on Property Finder. This is because a lot of down payments are used in the rental sector. Many “brokers” put ads of properties online for favorable rental prices. When a tenant responds to an ad from abroad, a deposit must be made to reserve the property for his or her use. It is very common for tenants to make this deposit and never hear back from the “broker”. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to check if rental ads on Property Finder are real. The only way to check is to schedule a viewing. Only when the real estate agent shows up with the keys can you be sure that the property is for rent and that the ad was genuine.

Dubai Land Department data

Property Finder is used to store a large store of data from the Dubai Land Department. This makes it easy to find previous sales prices of reference properties, as well as price trends for a specific project and price trends for various types of properties in different areas.

How to calculate a property value?

If you want to know if the offer forwarded to you is a good one, you can calculate a realistic property value yourself. You do this by diving into the Dubai Land Department data on Property Finder. For the calculation example provided below, we use the Skyros project of Samana.

Let's say you received the above advertisement as an offer from a real estate agent. The offer concerns a 40m2 studio for AED 850,000. But is this studio really worth this money?

Step 1: search for the project, in this case Samana Skyros, in de searchbar and filter on the buy sector.

Step 2: Click on any ad and scroll down until you get to the “price insights” section. Then click on “see all transactions in this location”. If there are no reference properties displayed, it means that there have not yet been any registrations of this particular project with the Dubai Land Department. If this is the case, you can also search by neighborhood instead of searching at the project level. Then in step 1, type in “Arjan” as the location instead of Samana Skyros, click on any ad and again scroll down to the “price insights” heading. Do this with different home ads and different towers to get a realistic picture of home values in Arjan.

Intermediate step: When you have navigated to the recent transactions screen, you can see the price trend of the past months.

Step 3: If you scroll further down the recent transactions screen, you will get to the recent transactions. This is where you can start calculating a realistic home value. Make sure the filter is set to “newest.” Based on the transactions above, we can see that the average AED price per Square Feet is hovering around 1900 for studios of 431 square feet in Samana Skyros. We do not include the October 21 outlier in the calculation because it goes against a realistic market value and because there are many references selling around 1900 AED per square feet.

Step 4: In this last step, we simply multiply the number of square feet from the advertisement (432) by the average sales price per square feet in AED of reference properties (1900) = 820,800 AED as a realistic value. With this we concluded that the studio is worth less than AED 850,000 because the secondary market (buyers) show that they are not yet willing to pay AED 850,000 for a studio in Samana Skyros.

Conclusion

Property Finder is a great website for those who know how to use it. So a lot of information can be extracted from Property Finder, so buyers no longer have to blindly rely on a real estate agent. This is not to say that it is bad to get yourself advice, on the contrary, but with this you can at least check if the person you are sitting across from you is telling the truth. For more information, contact the phone number below. 

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