Is buying on The World Islands too risky now?

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Is The World Islands still mostly unfinished?

Yes. The World Islands is much more real than it was a few years ago, but buying there still means buying into a destination that is only partly built out.

The old picture of hundreds of empty sand islands is outdated. The Heart of Europe has operating hospitality assets, Amali and Zuha have recorded very large villa sales, and Marriott recently signed The Ritz-Carlton Residences for another World Islands project. Buyers are putting serious money into the archipelago.

Still, The World Islands does not function like one finished neighbourhood. Development happens island by island, often under different developers, with different infrastructure, delivery schedules and business models.

The current property mix makes that obvious. Property Finder has only around 78 World Islands properties publicly listed for sale, and much of the available stock is still off-plan or tied to hotel developments. By comparison, Palm Jumeirah currently has roughly 2,800 listings across an established residential and hospitality market.

Recent Dubai Land Department-based datasets make the same point from another angle. Depending on how transactions are cleaned and classified, The World has recorded roughly 29 to 44 sales over the latest 12-month windows. Several datasets put close to 90% or more of those sales in off-plan property.

So The World has clearly moved beyond the "nothing is happening there" phase. What buyers still do not have today is a mature island market where most infrastructure, residences, hotels and resale patterns have already been tested.

Current measure	The World Islands	Palm Jumeirah	Dubai Harbour
Properties currently listed	~78	~2,778	~1,716
Latest 12-month sales	~29-44 depending on dataset	1,289	838
Recent off-plan share on The World	~89-93% in DLD-based datasets	Much more mixed	Much more mixed
Main access	Primarily marine	Road, monorail, marine	Road, nearby metro, marine
Market maturity	Still developing	Established	Established and still expanding

Are rich buyers actually buying homes on The World Islands now?

Yes. Ultra-wealthy buyers are clearly willing to spend huge amounts on selected World Islands villas today, and that is one of the strongest reasons to take the development more seriously than before.

Amali Island is the clearest example. Dubai Land Department transaction data shows six-bedroom villas selling for AED 71.44 million and AED 68.4 million earlier this year. A seven-bedroom property then registered at AED 220 million.

That AED 220 million transaction is roughly $60 million. It is difficult to dismiss demand as marketing hype when somebody is committing that amount to one villa.

Zuha Island has also produced real transactions around AED 69 million to AED 70 million. Four recent DLD-recorded Zuha sales clustered around that level, rather than appearing as one isolated deal.

Then there is the developer side. Marriott International recently announced The Ritz-Carlton Residences on The World Islands with AVENEW Development. The project has since been marketed as sold out. Together with Amali and Zuha, that gives us several separate examples of developers finding buyers at the very top of the market.

But the demand is highly concentrated. Someone spending AED 70 million or AED 220 million on an enormous private villa is buying scarcity, privacy and trophy value. That tells us surprisingly little about whether somebody should buy a 400-square-foot hotel studio for AED 2 million.

The World Islands now have a credible ultra-prime villa market. We should leave the conclusion there rather than assuming every property on the same archipelago benefits equally from it.

Is it hard to resell property on The World Islands?

Yes. Resale liquidity is currently one of the biggest weaknesses of The World Islands, especially for anyone who might need to exit within a few years.

Property Finder records just 37 transactions across The World Islands during its latest 12-month window, down 71.3% year on year. Other DLD-based databases produce totals between roughly 29 and 44 depending on their filters, but all of them tell broadly the same story: very few properties are changing hands.

Palm Jumeirah recorded 1,289 sales over the same Property Finder period. Dubai Harbour recorded 838.

Those areas are much larger, so comparing the raw numbers alone would be unfair. A better counterexample is Jumeirah Bay Island, where only 22 sales were recorded during the latest year despite property values that can reach hundreds of millions of dirhams.

Luxury markets can work with very few transactions.

The problem for The World is the combination of thin trading and unfinished development. Jumeirah Bay already has a bridge to the mainland, the Bulgari Resort, completed homes and an established ultra-prime identity. The World asks buyers to accept similarly narrow liquidity while also taking additional developer, access and destination-completion risk.

Recent monthly data makes the liquidity issue harder to ignore. One DLD-based database recorded zero World Islands sales in July, two in August and one in early September. Another source counted only five transactions over its latest three-month period.

That kind of market can still produce spectacular prices. It just means we cannot assume there will be a buyer waiting when we decide to sell.

Area	Latest 12-month transactions	Change versus previous year	What the volume tells us
The World Islands	37 on Property Finder	-71.3%	Extremely thin market
Palm Jumeirah	1,289	-18.3%	Deep luxury resale market
Dubai Harbour	838	-54.1%	Much larger active market
Jumeirah Bay Island	22	-37.1%	Thin, but mostly mature trophy property

Is property on The World Islands cheap enough to justify the extra risk?

Usually not. The World Islands currently ask buyers to accept extra risk without consistently giving them a cheap entry price in return.

Property Finder's current listings average about AED 4,105 per square foot across The World Islands. Palm Jumeirah is around AED 4,197 per square foot, while Dubai Harbour is around AED 4,165.

These averages contain very different types of property, so AED 4,100 on one island is not directly equivalent to AED 4,100 somewhere else. But the broad point survives: The World is not being sold as distressed waterfront property anymore.

Some Heart of Europe transactions look particularly expensive. Recent Cote d'Azur hotel studios have registered around AED 3,300, AED 4,200 and AED 4,900 per square foot, while other recent hotel transactions have exceeded AED 5,000 per square foot. A Marbella Resort Hotel studio registered above AED 5,200 per square foot, and a later Marbella transaction reached about AED 5,820.

Those prices overlap with premium properties in much more established Dubai waterfront areas.

A themed resort apartment can include hotel services and operate under a completely different model from a conventional residence, so the comparison is not perfect. Still, it removes one of the easiest arguments for taking the risk: "At least I am buying very cheaply."

The price gap is often much smaller than the risk gap.

Does the AED 220 million Amali sale make The World Islands safer?

Only for one very specific part of the story. The AED 220 million Amali sale confirms that The World Islands can support trophy-home prices, but it tells us almost nothing about the safety of a typical World Islands investment.

The scale difference is enormous. One AED 220 million villa is worth about as much as 100 hotel studios priced around AED 2.2 million.

That is why overall World Islands averages have become so misleading. Property Finder currently shows an average listing price above AED 24 million, up more than 200% year on year. The median asking price is only about AED 2.3 million.

A handful of Amali and Zuha villas therefore pull the average upward while most listed Heart of Europe units sit in a completely different price bracket.

We get a better picture by separating the products. Amali has recorded transactions around AED 68 million, AED 71 million and AED 220 million. Recent Zuha trades have clustered around AED 69 million to AED 70 million. Heart of Europe transactions can be closer to AED 1.5 million to AED 5 million.

Those buyers do not face the same risks and probably do not even have the same reasons for buying.

The Amali evidence is genuinely encouraging for the ultra-prime end of The World Islands. Using one spectacular villa sale to make smaller hotel or off-plan units look safer would be a stretch.

Did the Anantara closure expose a real weakness on The World Islands?

Yes. The closure of Anantara World Islands showed that completing a luxury resort does not automatically make the offshore business model work.

Anantara World Islands Dubai Resort opened in 2021 with around 70 rooms and villas. It was one of the clearest examples that the archipelago had finally moved from plans into actual tourism.

The resort later stopped operating after owner Seven Tides and operator Minor Hotels agreed to end operations. Minor said several external factors contributed rather than pointing to one single cause.

One closed hotel does not prove that every World Islands resort will struggle.

What it does prove is more useful: the difficult part continues after construction.

Anantara had already been built. It had an international luxury brand. Guests could book rooms. Yet reaching the resort still involved a marine transfer, and operating an isolated luxury property carries logistics that mainland resorts simply avoid.

That makes the closure especially relevant to hotel-apartment investors. A finished building can remove construction risk while leaving occupancy, transport, operator and destination risk fully alive.

A trophy-villa owner can tolerate those problems far more easily. Someone depending on nightly hotel revenue cannot.

Is boat access to The World Islands a serious problem?

For many investors, yes. Boat access gives The World Islands extraordinary privacy, but it also creates a permanent inconvenience that affects residents, tourists, workers and operating costs.

The islands sit roughly four kilometres off Dubai's coast. Getting there generally means travelling to a marina and completing the journey by boat.

For an occasional second home, that can be part of the fun. A billionaire using a villa a few weeks a year may even consider the separation a major advantage.

Daily life is different. Groceries, housekeeping, maintenance crews, hotel employees, building materials and emergency logistics all have to deal with the offshore location somehow.

Hospitality feels the effect most clearly because every extra step can influence demand. A tourist deciding between two luxury resorts may love the idea of a boat transfer. Another may simply choose the hotel they can reach directly from the airport by car.

The Heart of Europe has worked to improve access through marina arrangements and marine transport, and future operators may make the journey much smoother. Geography is still geography.

A Palm Jumeirah traffic jam is annoying. A World Islands property relies on marine transport as part of its basic operating system.

Type of buyer	How much boat access matters	Why
Trophy-villa buyer	Low to moderate	Privacy may outweigh inconvenience
Occasional second-home owner	Moderate	Fewer daily journeys
Full-time resident	High	Everyday logistics become harder
Hotel-apartment investor	High	Guest demand and operations depend on access
Short-term speculator	High	Smaller pool of potential resale buyers

Is The Heart of Europe basically finished now?

No. The Heart of Europe has enough completed development to prove that it exists, but buyers are still depending on more of the destination being finished and successfully operated.

This is a much better position than the project occupied years ago. Properties within Cote d'Azur have traded, parts of the resort have welcomed guests, and distinctive attractions such as Raining Street have moved beyond renderings.

Yet the broader destination continues to be built out.

Marbella Resort Hotel, associated with IHG's Vignette Collection, is part of that next phase. Kleindienst has also discussed more hotel openings, floating villas and additional hospitality concepts. This week, the Financial Times reported that the developer still expects another five hotels to open by 2027.

Today's investor is buying during the transition rather than after it.

There is upside if the additional hotels open, transport becomes easier and the islands attract much larger visitor numbers. The same dependency creates risk: valuations today already reflect expectations about what the destination can become.

Recent operating pressure makes that especially important. The Financial Times reported this week that The Heart of Europe has faced weaker international tourism, higher fuel and logistics costs, layoffs and legal disputes during the current regional disruption. Kleindienst told the newspaper that it was putting more emphasis on domestic tourism while continuing development.

We no longer need to ask whether The Heart of Europe will ever exist. The harder question is whether the completed and planned pieces can turn into a consistently successful resort destination.

We do not have enough operating history yet to answer that with high confidence.

Should the recent Heart of Europe court case worry buyers?

Yes. The Heart of Europe court case should make buyers much more demanding about the legal status of the exact property they are purchasing.

A Dubai Real Estate Court recently cancelled the purchase of a Heart of Europe hotel unit after an investor who had paid more than AED 1.37 million could not receive ownership.

According to the judgment reported by Gulf News, 13 legal attachments had been registered against the property between 2024 and 2025. Those attachments prevented the developer from transferring the title.

The court ordered the developer to refund more than AED 1.37 million, pay AED 150,000 in compensation and pay interest. It also cancelled the related hotel-management agreement.

That case concerned one unit and one dispute. It does not show that World Islands titles in general are defective.

Still, the problem was serious. The dispute centred on the developer's inability to complete one of the most basic parts of a property transaction: transferring ownership.

For a buyer looking at The Heart of Europe today, checking the project name on a brochure or seeing that construction is complete is nowhere near enough. We would want independent confirmation of the title status, current registered owner, attachments, mortgages, restrictions and any hotel-management obligations attached to the unit.

The case has made unit-level legal due diligence harder to dismiss as bureaucracy.

Doesn't Dubai's escrow system make World Islands off-plan property safe?

Dubai's escrow system removes some of the biggest off-plan risks, but it cannot make a World Islands investment safe by itself.

Dubai Land Department requires qualifying off-plan projects to be registered, and project escrow accounts control how buyer funds are collected and released. Off-plan sales are also recorded through the provisional property-registration system.

These rules are meaningful. Dubai off-plan buyers operate inside a much more structured system than buyers in markets where developers can collect deposits with little oversight.

What the system cannot guarantee is equally important.

A registered project can still be delayed. A completed property can still be difficult to resell. A hotel operator can leave. Visitor demand can disappoint. Service costs can rise. A buyer can discover that a "guaranteed return" is only as useful as the contract and counterparty behind it.

The Heart of Europe title-transfer dispute is a useful reminder. Regulatory structure existed, but the buyer still ended up in court.

We would therefore use Dubai Land Department's project-status information to verify the developer, escrow account, registered status and construction progress before buying. For The World Islands, those checks are the minimum.

Protection	What it actually helps with	What buyers still carry
DLD project registration	Confirms the project sits inside Dubai's regulatory system	Commercial risk
Escrow account	Controls treatment of off-plan project funds	Delay risk
Provisional registration	Records the off-plan purchase	Final title-transfer risk
Construction monitoring	Helps verify physical progress	Resale risk
Completed building	Removes most construction uncertainty	Operator, occupancy and maintenance risk

Can we trust the guaranteed returns advertised on World Islands hotel apartments?

We would not treat them like normal rental yields. A guaranteed return on a World Islands hotel apartment is a contractual promise, and buyers need to know exactly who is promising the money and what happens when the guarantee ends.

Current World Islands resale listings still advertise figures such as 8% guaranteed returns. Similar marketing has historically been a major selling point for hotel units within The Heart of Europe.

An 8% guarantee sounds simple. The underlying economics are not.

With a normal apartment, we can look at actual annual rents in the building, compare them with the purchase price and estimate what another tenant might pay later.

A hotel apartment often works through a hotel-management agreement or rental pool. Returns can depend on the operator, occupancy, room rates, management fees and the specific terms agreed with the owner.

This distinction becomes even more important on The World because there is very little conventional rental evidence. One current DLD-based market database reports no home-tenancy records from which it can calculate a normal residential yield for the community.

If a developer guarantees 8% for a limited period while the hotel itself would support only 4% after expenses once that guarantee disappears, the investor has not bought an 8%-yielding asset in any permanent sense.

Before taking the advertised percentage seriously, we would want to know the duration, whether the return is calculated on the full purchase price, which costs are deducted, who guarantees it, what financial resources that entity has and what the owner's income looks like once the guarantee expires.

Without those answers, the percentage is marketing information rather than evidence of sustainable yield.

Is a World Islands hotel apartment basically the same investment as a Dubai apartment?

No. A World Islands hotel apartment is much more dependent on one resort continuing to attract guests and operate successfully than a normal Dubai residential apartment.

Consider a conventional two-bedroom apartment in an established area. The owner can usually live there, rent it annually, sell it to an end user or sell it to another landlord. If one tenant leaves, the apartment still has several possible uses.

A 400-square-foot hotel room on an offshore resort works differently. Its appeal can be tied closely to the hotel brand, management agreement, room-pool structure and tourist demand for that exact destination.

Recent World Islands transactions show why grouping everything together makes little sense.

Studios within The Heart of Europe have sold around AED 1.4 million to AED 2.5 million or more. At the same time, recent Amali and Zuha villas have been selling around AED 70 million, with Amali producing the AED 220 million outlier.

Both appear under "The World Islands" in property databases. Economically, they barely resemble each other.

The villa buyer owns an exceptionally scarce piece of luxury residential property. The hotel-unit buyer has much more exposure to how well a particular hospitality operation performs.

That difference should shape almost every part of the investment decision, from the price we are willing to pay to the amount of leverage we are comfortable using.

Is The World Islands riskier right now because tourism and the region are under pressure?

Yes, particularly for hotel-linked property. The latest regional disruption has made the weak points of an offshore tourism destination much easier to see.

The Financial Times reported this week that the current Middle East conflict has hurt tourism flows into Dubai and created additional pressure on The Heart of Europe through higher fuel costs and more difficult logistics.

Those issues hit an offshore resort harder than they hit a normal apartment building.

Fuel influences boat operations. International visitor weakness affects hotel occupancy. Logistics become more expensive when practically everything needed by a resort has to cross the water. A slower tourism market also makes it harder for new hotels to establish themselves quickly.

This does not mean the current pressure will last for years. Dubai's tourism market has recovered from major disruptions before, and Kleindienst says it is shifting toward local visitors while continuing its planned openings.

But today's conditions give us a useful stress test. They show what happens when several disadvantages of an offshore hospitality model appear at the same time.

A family buying an Amali villa for ten years may barely care about one bad tourism period. Somebody buying a hotel studio because a brochure promises high annual returns is much more exposed.

That is one reason we should stop talking about "World Islands risk" as though every buyer faces the same thing.

Would we buy on The World Islands instead of Palm Jumeirah at the same price?

For a normal investment, we would choose the mature Dubai waterfront property unless The World Islands property offered something genuinely exceptional.

The difference today is easier to see because prices increasingly overlap.

Property Finder's asking-price data sits around AED 4,100 per square foot for The World Islands, AED 4,200 for Palm Jumeirah and AED 4,165 for Dubai Harbour. Individual World Islands hotel transactions can climb much higher.

At the same time, Palm Jumeirah has recorded 1,289 sales during the latest 12 months. The World has recorded only a few dozen, depending on the dataset.

Palm buyers also get road access, supermarkets, restaurants, beach clubs, schools within practical driving distance, a huge hotel ecosystem and years of evidence showing what different buildings actually rent and resell for.

None of this means a Palm property will automatically outperform.

It means that when two properties cost roughly the same amount per square foot, we need a clear reason to accept the extra uncertainty offshore.

An Amali villa can provide that reason. Owning an enormous, extraordinarily private island home is something Palm Jumeirah cannot perfectly reproduce.

A standard investment apartment has a harder case to make.

When the World Islands unit offers neither a substantial discount nor a truly irreplaceable property, we are taking more risk without getting much obvious compensation.

Who should actually buy on The World Islands now?

The World Islands make the most sense today for buyers who can hold for a long time, tolerate a difficult resale and value a specific property enough that short-term investment performance is secondary.

That describes the ultra-prime villa buyer quite well.

Someone spending AED 70 million, AED 100 million or AED 220 million on Amali or Zuha is probably not depending on an easy mortgage, an 8% rental yield or a resale next year. The buyer wants something Dubai has very little of: an enormous private waterfront home separated physically from the city.

The riskier profile is the smaller investor buying an off-plan hotel unit, particularly if the purchase only works financially because of a payment plan, a future resale or an advertised guaranteed return.

The latest transaction data is uncomfortable for that strategy. The World has only produced a few dozen transactions over the last year, recent activity is overwhelmingly off-plan in several DLD-based datasets, and the wider destination is still being completed.

Current listings also include phrases such as "serious seller," "investor deal" and "motivated seller." Listing language proves very little on its own because Dubai agents use those phrases constantly. Combined with such low transaction volume, though, it reinforces the point that we should never assume a fast exit.

The buyer who can comfortably own the property for ten years has choices.

The buyer who may need the money back in two years is taking a much bigger gamble.

Is buying on The World Islands too risky now?

Yes for most conventional property investors. The World Islands are currently too risky to buy casually, especially when we are talking about off-plan hotel units, short holding periods or purchases that depend on promised rental returns.

The evidence has become much clearer.

The positive side is real. Amali has produced AED 68 million, AED 71 million and AED 220 million transactions. Zuha has recorded several sales around AED 69 million to AED 70 million. Marriott has committed The Ritz-Carlton brand to another development. Parts of The Heart of Europe are operating. Serious developers and extremely wealthy buyers clearly believe that selected islands can work.

Conventional investors have to deal with another set of numbers. The whole World Islands market has produced only a few dozen sales over the latest year. Transaction activity has fallen sharply. Recent registered activity is heavily concentrated in off-plan property. Some hotel units already trade at AED 4,000 to AED 5,000-plus per square foot, so buyers do not always get a large discount for accepting extra uncertainty.

Operational evidence is mixed too. Anantara World Islands opened and later closed. The Heart of Europe still depends on further hotel openings to complete its destination. A recent court case showed how one investor could pay more than AED 1.37 million yet still fail to receive title because legal attachments blocked the transfer. The latest regional disruption has also exposed how quickly marine logistics and tourism dependence can become expensive problems.

The mistake would be to put every World Islands property into the same bucket.

An Amali or Zuha villa bought by somebody who wants an extraordinary home and can hold it for a decade is defensible today. The scarcity is real, the buyer base exists and the property itself may be almost impossible to replicate elsewhere in Dubai.

A small hotel unit bought primarily for an advertised return is a much harder proposition. We are then depending on the developer, completion of the surrounding destination, transport, hotel operations, tourism demand, contractual returns and an extremely narrow resale market at the same time.

That is too many things that need to go right unless the purchase price is exceptional.

The World Islands no longer deserve the old "failed Dubai project" label. Parts of the archipelago have clearly broken out of that history. But the market remains one of the easiest places in Dubai to confuse a spectacular property with a safe investment.

For now, we would make the individual property prove why it deserves the extra risk. We would not buy simply because The World Islands finally seem to be working.

Fact-checked and reviewed by our local expert

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Ines Benaddi 🇲🇦🇫🇷

Real Estate Agent, Dubai Real Estate

Ines is an expert in Dubai’s property market and her insights were precious to help us write this blog post. With her experience and the support of a leading agency, she provides personalized guidance to help you maximize your investment and achieve your real estate goals in Dubai.

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