Ras Al Khaimah property market 2025: the record figure is not a buying record

The Ras Al Khaimah property market closed 2025 with AED 18.80 billion in registered transactions. That is the highest annual figure the municipality has published and 25 percent above 2024. It has been read as a buying boom. The report itself does not support that reading, and the difference is large enough to change how you would approach a purchase.

Ras Al Khaimah is the northernmost of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, around 45 minutes by road from Dubai International Airport according to the emirate’s tourism authority. Its land registry is run by the Lands and Properties Sector of RAK Municipality, which publishes annual, half-year and monthly transaction reports.

What does the AED 18.80bn record actually contain?

The annual report of the Lands and Properties Sector at RAK Municipality splits every registered transaction in the Ras Al Khaimah property market into three categories: sales, mortgages and waivers. Only the first of the three records somebody buying a property.

The three lines add up to the headline in both years, which is a check anyone can run: 3.19 plus 12.68 plus 2.93 gives 18.80. Now divide the headline by the sales line. The result is 5.89. Read the record as buying volume and you overstate the sales side of the Ras Al Khaimah property market by a factor of 5.9.

Why did mortgages in the Ras Al Khaimah property market rise 159 percent?

Registered mortgage value in the Ras Al Khaimah property market went from AED 4.89 billion in 2024 to AED 12.68 billion in 2025. That is a factor of 2.6, which is an increase of 159 percent and not a tripling. The count rose far less steeply, from 1,224 to 1,480.

That increase is not spread across the year. The municipality’s half-year report puts AED 11.69 billion of it in the first half alone, and its monthly report places AED 9.84 billion in March 2025 on 109 registered mortgages, a count inside its normal range. The 2024 total leans the same way: AED 3.48 billion of it falls in July.

So the annual figure turns on a handful of large contracts, not on a broad shift in borrowing. The report also gives only the registered value: it does not say how much financed a purchase and how much was refinancing. We cannot split it and we will not guess.

Does a mortgage record mean more people bought?

No. A mortgage registration records a charge against a property, not a change of owner. The report counts sales separately, and that count fell by 21 transactions between the two years.

Did prices in the Ras Al Khaimah property market fall by half?

Sales value in Ras Al Khaimah fell 50.4 percent while the number of sales fell by 0.7 percent. That combination moves the average sale sharply, and the average sale is not a price.

Sales value divided by number of sales gives AED 1.08 million for 2025 against AED 2.16 million for 2024. That division is ours, not a figure the report states, and it produces a mean rather than a median. The report publishes no median, and a small number of large deals pulls a mean hard in either direction.

The report contains no price index and no price per square foot. A fall in sales value in the Ras Al Khaimah property market is therefore not a fall in prices, and presenting it as one claims something the source does not carry.

What pulled the sales figure down?

One use category carries most of the fall. The report classifies transactions by use, and the category it labels Touristic went from AED 2.65 billion across 10 transactions in 2024 to AED 341.5 million across 2 transactions in 2025.

Touristic is the report’s own label for a use class. It is not our description of an asset type, and we are not going to translate it into one. Strip that category out and the rest of the Ras Al Khaimah property market looks different: sales excluding Touristic fell from AED 3.79 billion to AED 2.85 billion, or 24.8 percent. Touristic made up 41.2 percent of sales value in 2024 and 10.7 percent in 2025.

Noble Assets Properties sells property in Ras Al Khaimah, including on Al Marjan. Read the next figure with that in mind, because it works against our own sales story. The region the report calls Jazeerat Al Marjan fell 77 percent in sales value, from AED 4.04 billion to AED 940.3 million, across 250 sales against 378. Since the report publishes no price per square foot, we cannot tell you that prices there fell 77 percent, and we will not pretend otherwise.

What does the Ras Al Khaimah property market mean for a buyer in the UAE?

For a buyer resident in the United Arab Emirates the binding constraint is usually financing, and the Central Bank of the UAE caps lending on any off-plan purchase at 50 percent loan to value, whatever the buyer’s nationality or residency status.

Circular 31/2013, as amended by Board Resolution 31/2/2020 in April 2020, sets 80 percent for an expatriate’s first owner-occupied home below AED 5 million and 60 percent for a second or investment property. The off-plan cap sits below all of them, and a large share of new supply in the emirate is sold off-plan. Individual banks may apply stricter limits than the regulation requires.

On timing, this report cannot help. It covers 2024 and 2025 and has been on the municipality’s site since July 2026. There is no 2026 half-year report yet: the latest covers the second half of 2025. Anyone telling you these figures prove that now is the moment is reading something into the Ras Al Khaimah property market that is not there.

What the figures support is narrower and more useful: the composition of the Ras Al Khaimah property market changed more than its size did. For the same market seen through valuations rather than registrations, our note on the ValuStrat index for Ras Al Khaimah covers the other half, and our regions overview shows where these categories sit. The figures come from the Lands and Properties Sector of RAK Municipality. Ask us for the nationality table.