Who Is Buying UAE Property? What Official Data Says About Nationalities

A table keeps circulating on social media: "Top buyers of Dubai property — India 22%, UK 17%, China 14%, Saudi Arabia 11%, Russia 9%." It looks official. I have not found a Dubai Land Department publication with those percentages, and I would not repeat them. Here is what the regulators do publish — for Abu Dhabi, where I work — and how to read it without overstating it.

What ADREC published for H1 2026

According to ADREC's H1 2026 transaction release:

• Total real estate transactions: AED 117 billion. That includes sales, mortgages and other transaction types.
• Sales: AED 86.1 billion across 16,838 transactions. Residential unit sales — the figure most relevant to apartment buyers — were AED 70.4 billion, per the full market report summarised in our H1 2026 market page.
• Mortgages: AED 26.7 billion.
• Foreign direct investment: AED 13.8 billion, up 309% year on year.
• 116 non-resident investor nationalities, up from 82 a year earlier.
• Leading FDI source markets named: the United Kingdom, China, the Russian Federation, the United States, Germany and France.

Two things the release does not do: it does not rank those markets with percentages, and it does not publish a full table of buyers by passport. So "the UK is number one with X%" is not something I can say from this source. I list them in the order the release does, without assigning positions.

Where Kazakhstan appears

In ADREC's 2025 annual release, FDI for the year was AED 8.2 billion, and Kazakhstan is named alongside Russia, China, the UK, the US and France as a significant contributor. That is a meaningful mention for a country of Kazakhstan's size. The H1 2026 release does not name Kazakhstan among its leading markets — which does not mean Kazakh investment stopped; it means it was not among the markets ADREC chose to highlight for that half.

Three distinctions that most posts ignore

Non-residents versus all buyers. FDI figures cover investors who are not UAE residents. A Kazakh or British citizen who lives in Abu Dhabi and buys here is usually counted as a resident, not as FDI. Nationality tables that mix the two say very little.

Value versus number of deals. A small number of very large purchases can make a nationality look dominant by value. A large number of mid-market purchases can look small. Always ask which one is being measured.

Abu Dhabi versus Dubai. ADREC data is about Abu Dhabi. DLD data is about Dubai. The markets have different buyer mixes, and a statistic from one is not evidence about the other.

My take

The headline I take from ADREC is not who is first. It is breadth: 116 non-resident nationalities in half a year, up from 82. A market with a wide base of foreign buyers is less dependent on any one economy, currency or political relationship. That is a healthier signal than any single country's share.

For buyers from Kazakhstan specifically, the official mention in 2025 matches what I see in practice: steady, considered interest, often from families diversifying out of tenge. I wrote separately about why Kazakhstani buyers look at Dubai and Abu Dhabi — without pretending to know shares that nobody has published.

If you see a nationality ranking with precise percentages, ask for the document. If it exists, it will have a publisher, a period and a definition.