MBR City Savills forecasts a 10% fall in Dubai prime values, against a flat world
A district that is still being built has a specific interest in the word oversupply, because it is the word that describes the district.
The forecast
In its World Cities Prime Residential Index published on 19 August 2026, Savills expects prime capital values across the 30 cities it tracks to rise 0.5% in the second half of 2026: growth in 16 markets, flat in 10, declines in four. Dubai is described as the clear outlier, with values forecast to fall by around 10% on oversupply and geopolitical uncertainty.
Where Dubai sits in the half just gone
Dubai recorded declines in both capital values and rents in the six months to June 2026 — grouped by Savills with Berlin and Bangkok. The index average over the same period was +0.6% on values and +1.1% on rents.
What the rest of the field is doing
Cape Town is forecast to lead, at 4% to 5.9%. Singapore, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Lisbon, Madrid and Barcelona are put at 2% to 3.9%. North America’s major cities are expected to be broadly flat. London and San Francisco are forecast to fall modestly, up to -1.9%; Sydney by -2% to -3.9%.
The mechanism Savills names
The report’s organising idea is that supply, not sentiment, separates the winners from the losers: markets that combine constrained supply, household wealth creation and sustained international demand outperform, while elevated supply or heightened uncertainty holds a market back.
The uncomfortable part of this forecast is that it is a supply argument, and supply is the one variable a buyer can check independently. Handover pipelines are published, and a district where several thousand units complete inside eighteen months is describing its own next two years whatever any index says. That is worth doing before deciding whether a global forecaster’s number applies to a specific building — prime and mainstream do not move together, and a 10% headline drawn from top-tier villa and penthouse transactions can coexist with a stable mid-market. Two cautions in both directions. Savills is forecasting the top slice of the market in a city where the top slice is unusually thin and unusually exposed to a small number of large transactions, so the figure carries wide error bars. But a forecaster with no position in the market saying the quiet part in print is more useful than a broker’s outlook, and the sensible response to it is not to argue with the number but to price the risk it describes: buy for use rather than for exit, and treat any purchase whose case depends on capital growth inside three years as a bet rather than a plan.
Source: Savills checked against the source
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