Dubai Scraps the AED 750,000 Minimum for Its 2-Year Property Investor Visa: Who Qualifies Now

Dubai has quietly rewritten one of the most-asked-about rules in its property market. The Dubai Land Department has dropped the AED 750,000 minimum property value that used to sit between a home buyer and a two-year residency visa, as long as the buyer is the sole owner of the home. Put simply, if the title deed carries one name, the price paid no longer decides whether that purchase can support residency in Dubai.

The update went live on the department's Cube platform in late April, and the eligibility text now says it plainly: a sole owner may apply for the licence and residency visa regardless of the property value. For years the AED 750,000 figure was the number every broker and off-plan salesperson repeated. For single owners, it is gone.

What the new thresholds say

• Sole owners: no minimum value at all. A studio, a one-bedroom flat in an outer district or a modest resale unit now clears the bar, provided the home is fully owned and registered in one name.
• Joint owners: each co-owner must hold a share worth at least AED 400,000. That floor is deliberate, so two partners cannot split one cheap flat into thin shares to manufacture a pair of visas.

The permit in question is the familiar two-year, renewable residence visa, not the ten-year Golden Visa, which still asks for property worth AED 2 million. Applications run through the DLD Cube Centre alongside the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs, and the core paperwork of a title deed, a police clearance and a medical is still meant to be handled in a single visit.

Why it matters for entry-level buyers

The old threshold left many genuine buyers in an odd spot. They owned a home in Dubai yet could not turn it into residency because it was priced a little too low. That mostly caught people buying studios and one-bedroom apartments in emerging communities such as Jumeirah Village Circle, Dubai South and International City, the very districts where stock under AED 750,000 is common, and where the change opens a door that was shut a month earlier.

For the wider market the read is straightforward. Tying residency to almost any wholly owned home makes the cheaper end of Dubai's inventory more useful rather than merely cheaper, and that tends to support demand where price growth had been slowest. Anyone weighing an entry-level purchase can now compare qualifying off-plan homes across Dubai knowing that ownership and residency travel together, whatever the ticket size.