Al Marjan Island Property Market: What 2,965 Live Listings Really Show

Open any property portal. Search the Al Marjan Island property market. You will see one number: the average price per square foot. It looks like a fact. It is not.

In August 2026 I counted every live sale listing on the island myself. After I removed the duplicates, 2,965 homes were on the market. 78% of them were off-plan. The median asking price was AED 2.62 million, or AED 2,580 per square foot.

But here is the part nobody tells you. Every one of those numbers is an asking price. Not one is a sale price. And in Ras Al Khaimah, nobody publishes what buyers actually pay.

Let me show you what that means for your money.

The Al Marjan Island property market has a checking problem

Think about how you buy anything expensive. A car, for example. Before you pay, you check what other people paid. You look up the market value. Then you know if the seller is being fair.

Now try that with a home on Al Marjan Island.

You cannot do it. The information does not exist in public. So you are left with one thing: what sellers are asking. And a seller’s asking price tells you what a seller hopes for, not what a home is worth.

In Dubai I can run the normal checks on whether a property is a good deal. Here, half of those checks simply have nothing to run against.

Why this is not a small problem

Most “market updates” about this island repeat a portal average and call it a price. Then buyers use that number to judge an offer. In other words, they check one asking price against a pile of other asking prices.

That is not a check at all. It is a circle.

Why this matters to you: if you are buying here, you cannot verify a price the normal way. So you need to understand exactly what the numbers you can see are made of. That is what the rest of this article does.

Ras Al Khaimah property market data: what gets published, and what does not

Let me be fair to Ras Al Khaimah first. People often say the emirate publishes nothing. That is wrong.

What Ras Al Khaimah does publish

RAK Municipality has a Lands and Properties Sector. It publishes transaction reports as PDF files. There are monthly reports, half-year reports and annual reports, going back to 2015.

The numbers inside are real. In the first half of 2026, property sales reached AED 1.353 billion across 1,274 transactions. Mortgages added AED 1.160 billion across 463 deals, and waivers added AED 380 million across 348.

These reports also break the market down, and the breakdown is better than people assume. The newest one on the list covers the first half of 2025. That file would not open for me, so I checked an older one that did, covering the first half of 2019. It splits activity by transaction type, by property use, by 52 named districts and even by buyer nationality.

So this is a real publication, and the structure inside it is good. Credit where it is due.

So this is a real publication. Credit where it is due.

What Ras Al Khaimah does not publish

Now the gap.

Those reports are totals. They never list a single sale. They never show the price of one home.

The H1 2026 release goes further and gives no area breakdown at all. So you cannot learn what share of those 1,274 sales happened on Al Marjan Island. In the 2019 report I could open, Al Marjan is not one of the 52 named districts either

There is also no searchable platform, no file to download and no API. On 26 August 2026 I checked again. Nothing had changed, and nothing had been announced.

Why Dubai feels so different

Dubai works the other way around. The Dubai Land Department publishes a record-level dataset on Dubai Pulse. It updates daily. Each row carries a transaction ID, the community, the building, the size and the price paid.

Anyone can download it. Anyone can check any claim against it. That is how I was able to test whether sellers in Business Bay and Dubai Creek Harbour actually make money across roughly 115,000 registered repeat sales. None of that is possible in Ras Al Khaimah.

That is the honest comparison. Dubai publishes the transactions. Ras Al Khaimah publishes the total. Abu Dhabi sits somewhere in between, which is why what the Abu Dhabi register safely shows is its own question.

Why this matters to you: in Dubai you can verify. On Al Marjan Island you cannot. So the quality of your advice matters far more here, and so does the quality of the counting.

I counted every listing myself. It took one afternoon.

Since no sale data exists, I went to the only data that does. On 25 August 2026 I pulled every Al Marjan Island sale listing from Property Finder.

The raw file had 3,454 rows. That number is wrong, and I knew it would be. Let me walk you through why.

Headline counts are almost always wrong in this market. When I checked the JVC supply pipeline against the register, the real number of active projects was 139, not the 63 everyone repeats.

Step one: remove what is not a home

First I removed 73 rows that are not homes. That means 60 hotel and hotel apartment listings, 7 bulk-sale units, 5 land plots and 1 whole building.

Next I removed 22 rows with no size or no bedroom count. I cannot use a listing that will not tell me how big it is.

That left 3,359 rows to work with.

Step two: the surprise that changed the method

Then I tried the obvious thing. Every listing has a reference code, so I matched on the reference code to find duplicates.

It removed nothing. Zero rows.

Here is why. Each brokerage writes its own reference code. So when five agencies list the same apartment, you get five listings with five different codes. The reference number cannot see the duplicate. It never could.

This is exactly how a raw portal count gets inflated.

Step three: match on the home, not the paperwork

So I matched on the property itself instead: same tower, same bedroom count, same size in square feet, same asking price.

That found 283 duplicate clusters and removed 394 rows. It left 2,965 listings.

By the way, 108 of those clusters were a single brokerage duplicating itself.

Step four: admit what I still cannot know

Now the honest part, and I want to be clear about it.

My method still counts one apartment twice if two agents quote different prices for it. So I tested the other extreme. I ignored price and matched on tower, bedrooms and size alone. The count dropped to 1,919.

But 1,919 is too low. A single tower can hold fifty identical one-bedroom layouts, and those really are fifty different apartments.

So the truth sits in a range. The number of distinct homes for sale is somewhere between 1,919 and 2,965. I use 2,965, and I show you the floor rather than hiding it.

For scale, Marjan LLC says Al Marjan Island has 18,650 planned residential units. So my census covers about 16% of everything planned for the island. Not 16% of what exists, because no first-party figure for delivered units has been published.

Why this matters to you: when somebody quotes you a listing count for this island, ask how they counted. If they pulled a portal number straight off the screen, it is roughly 16% too high.

Al Marjan Island off-plan listings: four homes in five do not exist yet

Now for the finding that explains almost everything else.

Of the 2,965 listings, 2,313 are off-plan and 651 are ready. One listing carries no build status, so I left it out of the split. That gives a 78% to 22% market.

Read that again. Four out of every five homes for sale on Al Marjan Island have not been built.

First sales and resales

The off-plan side splits into two very different things.

1,402 are developer first sales. The developer is selling a new unit directly.

911 are off-plan resales. Somebody bought early, and now they are selling the contract before the building finishes. That is almost a third of the whole market.

Somebody else found the same thing

I do not want you to trust one dataset, so here is a second one. Cavendish Maxwell reported that off-plan made up about 85% of all Ras Al Khaimah sales in 2025, roughly 5,600 deals out of 6,600.

Different method, different base, same conclusion. This is a market in buildings that do not exist yet.

Why this matters to you: an off-plan price is set by a developer, not by a buyer and a seller meeting in the middle. When 78% of listings carry developer pricing, the “average” you see is mostly a launch price list. This is the same trap I wrote about in what buyers miss when they focus on launch prices, and what you pay extra for a building that is not there yet.

Al Marjan Island price per square foot: one island, two very different prices

Earlier I told you the median asking price is AED 2,580 per square foot. Now let me take that number apart, because on its own it misleads people every day.

Split the same 2,965 listings by build status:

Ready homes ask a little over half what off-plan homes ask.

This gap is not a discount

Please do not read that as a bargain waiting for you. It is not a discount. It is two different products sharing one island.

The ready stock is mostly first-generation Al Marjan. Bab Al Bahar asks a median of AED 1,186 per square foot across 161 listings. Pacific asks AED 1,426 across 324. Danah Bay asks AED 2,206 across 84.

The off-plan stock is mostly new and branded. Among projects with at least 30 listings, the medians run from AED 2,108 at Rosso Bay Residence up to AED 4,368 at Tonino Lamborghini Residence.

So the island average is not a price level. It is a mixture. And the mixture leans heavily toward new build.

This happens everywhere once you look. In Business Bay, two offices in the same district can carry double the rent. In Dubai Creek Harbour, the most expensive square footage quietly became the cheapest. One district average would have hidden both.

Three numbers, one island

Here is where it gets interesting. Three organisations publish a price for this island. Look at what happens.

Bayut’s published index put Al Marjan Island at AED 2,576.60 per square foot in July 2026. This figure is portal-sourced and directional.

My own census median came out at AED 2,580 per square foot. I built it independently, from raw rows, with my own deduplication.

Those two land within 0.2% of each other. That is not luck. It shows you exactly what a portal index is: an average of asking prices, weighted by whatever happens to be listed that month.

ValuStrat builds its Ras Al Khaimah index from valuations instead of listings. It put Al Marjan Island apartments at AED 1,160 per square foot in Q2 2026, on a typical capital value of AED 928,000.

That sits below my ready-only asking median of AED 1,471. Honestly, it should. Sellers ask above valuation, and a valuation basket tracks finished homes rather than launch pricing.

So one island produces AED 2,580 and AED 1,160 at the same time. Neither is a crash and neither is a bargain. They answer different questions.

Why this matters to you: before you accept any price per square foot for Al Marjan, ask one question. Does it cover ready homes, off-plan homes, or both mixed together? The answer can move the number by 85%.

Here is a five minute check almost nobody runs. Before you offer on a home here, find out what the other listings in that same building are asking today, and how long they have been asking it. That tells you more than any island average ever will.

Al Marjan Island property prices by bedroom: what each size asks

Let us get practical. Here is what each size asks, from the same 2,965 listings. I have shown n for every row, because the large sizes are thin.

Type	Listings	Median ask	Middle 50% range	Median size
Studio	375	AED 1.08m	AED 0.80m to 1.40m	450 sqft
1 bedroom	1,149	AED 2.10m	AED 1.60m to 2.60m	851 sqft
2 bedroom	874	AED 3.50m	AED 2.53m to 4.30m	1,381 sqft
3 bedroom	388	AED 6.19m	AED 5.00m to 8.16m	2,381 sqft
4 bedroom	121	AED 14.45m	AED 10.00m to 18.50m	4,726 sqft
5 bedroom	46	AED 25.10m	AED 14.38m to 33.00m	7,573 sqft

The jump starts at three bedrooms

Studios, one bedroom and two bedroom homes all ask roughly the same per square foot, around AED 2,500. So far, so simple.

Then something changes. From three bedrooms upward the premium climbs fast. A five bedroom home asks AED 3,200 per square foot at the median.

Read the spread, not the average

Now look at the “middle 50%” column, because that column matters more than the median.

Half of all two bedroom listings sit between AED 2.53m and AED 4.30m. That is a 70% range for the same bedroom count on the same island.

Why this matters to you: if somebody quotes you “the two bedroom price” on Al Marjan, they are hiding that spread. Ask for the range and the sample size instead. A median without a range is half an answer. Where sale data does exist, I can go further and compare what one, two and three bedroom homes actually achieved rather than what they asked.

Al Marjan Island apartments for sale sit in very few places

The 2,965 listings spread across 66 sub-communities and 77 towers. But they spread very unevenly.

The five largest hold 32.4% of everything listed. The top ten hold 47.1%. The top twenty hold 66.2%.

So two thirds of the island’s supply sits in twenty places. The other 46 sub-communities share the remaining third between them.

The biggest clusters are Pacific with 325 listings, Rosso Bay Residence with 202, Bab Al Bahar with 161, Danah Bay with 142 and Nikki Beach Residences with 130.

What concentration does to you when you sell

Picture two owners on the same island.

The first owns a flat in a tower with 200 live listings. When she sells, she competes with 199 near-identical homes. Buyers can walk away easily, because ten more units look just like hers.

The second owns a flat in a project with 12 listings. He competes with 11.

Same island, same day, completely different position.

Why this matters to you: concentration is a liquidity signal, and you can see it even though sale prices stay hidden. Check how many listings sit in your building before you buy, not after. In Dubai I can measure the other half of that signal too, because the register shows how long a home sits empty between tenants. Also worth knowing: 221 brokerages and 464 agents share these listings, and the top ten brokerages handle 45% of them.

Asking is not selling. Here is the real difference.

We have reached the heart of it. Everything above comes from asking prices. So let me be precise about what that can and cannot do for you.

What listing data can tell you

It tells you supply. How many homes sit on the market, where they are, and what type they are. This part is reliable, because a listing either exists or it does not.

It tells you seller expectations. The median ask is a real measure of what sellers hope for. That is useful, and it is honest as long as you call it what it is.

What listing data cannot tell you

It cannot tell you what anything sold for. No amount of listing data produces a sale price. In Ras Al Khaimah only RAK Municipality knows, and it publishes totals. Even a full register needs reading with care, which is why some registered sales carry no price information at all.

It cannot tell you the discount to asking. In Dubai you can measure this, because both sides get published. Here you cannot measure it at all. So if somebody quotes you a specific negotiation discount for Al Marjan, they are estimating, however confident they sound.

It cannot tell you where the market is heading. A rising asking average can mean prices are rising. It can also mean one expensive tower launched last month. On an island that is 78% off-plan, the second explanation is usually the stronger one.

One more thing: the market is cooling

This part rarely appears in the coverage, so I will say it plainly.

Ras Al Khaimah slowed down in 2025. Cavendish Maxwell recorded about 6,600 residential transactions, down 17.4% on 2024. Total value fell 24.7% to AED 12.4 billion.

ValuStrat’s index for the emirate then dipped 0.5% in Q2 2026 against the previous quarter. Al Marjan apartment growth also slowed, from 13.2% year on year in Q1 2026 to 9.4% in Q2.

Most articles about this island still describe a boom. The measured data describes a market that has stopped rising.

Your takeaway: five things to carry into any conversation

If you remember nothing else from this page, remember these.

1. Nobody can show you a sale price here. Ras Al Khaimah publishes the total, not the transactions. So treat every price you are quoted as an asking price or a valuation until somebody proves otherwise.

2. The island average is a mixture, not a price. At AED 2,733 per square foot for off-plan and AED 1,471 for ready, the blended figure describes what is listed, not what anything is worth.

3. Ask which population a number covers. Off-plan, ready, or both? That single question moves the answer by 85%, and most people quoting you the number have never asked it.

4. Counts are inflated until somebody deduplicates them. A raw pull said 3,454. Careful matching said 2,965. Reference numbers caught none of the duplicates.

5. Your competition is visible even though prices are not. Count the live listings in your building. That number tells you how hard your exit will be, and you can check it today, for free.

Frequently asked questions

Before you buy here

I am Fahad Al Kuwari, a buyer’s consultant. I work for buyers on the Al Marjan Island property market. I do not work for sellers or developers, and I build my own datasets because the published ones do not answer the questions buyers actually have.

So if you want the listing history, the live competition and an honest comparable set for one specific building before you commit, that is exactly what I do. You will find me at fahadalkuwari.com.