By Elliot Brown
The UAE’s real estate market attracts considerable domestic and international investment, with major hotels, office towers, residential portfolios and mixed-use developments changing hands. In 2025, Dubai recorded more than AED917 billion in real estate transactions and Abu Dhabi recorded a further AED142 billion.
Although recent regional tensions have created an element of uncertainty, the underlying scale and long-term significance of the UAE property market remain unchanged.
Crucially, the physical condition and regulatory compliance of an asset can have a material bearing on its value, future costs and investment performance.
And in the current environment, investors and other stakeholders face even greater pressure to protect their interests by carrying out robust due diligence and identifying risks within their control.
The issue is becoming increasingly relevant following the introduction of Dubai’s Law No. 3 of 2026 concerning the quality and safety of buildings.
The law specifically requires building condition assessments to confirm compliance with Dubai Civil Defence’s fire and life safety requirements, alongside ongoing maintenance and the rectification of identified defects.
For investors acquiring significant assets, this reinforces the importance of establishing the actual condition of a building’s fire-protection measures before completing the transaction, rather than relying solely on existing certificates and documentation.
Existing system approvals and certificates are usually treated as evidence that a building is compliant. In reality, they confirm at best the compliance of systems at the point of testing and installation, not the condition of the asset today.
A completion certificate says a fire strategy was signed off; it says nothing about whether compartmentation lines have since been breached by M&E penetrations, whether fire doors still meet their rated performance, and whether passive fire protection has been maintained as buildings are fitted out, re-let, and altered over their life.
The detail matters. A fire door’s certification is only valid for the tested configuration. I.E leaf, frame, hinges, intumescent seals, and hardware as a matched set.
Replace a hinge, over-cut a gap beyond tolerance, or fit incompatible ironmongery, the door may no longer perform to its rated standard, regardless of what the original certificate says.
The same applies to compartment walls and floors: a single unsealed service penetration can compromise an entire fire strategy, and these defects are invisible without physical inspection.
This is where risk transfers silently to the purchaser. Fire-safety defects identified after completion are not a shared problem; they sit with the new owner, and they are rarely priced into the deal because they were never surfaced during diligence.
What was assumed to be a compliant asset can turn out to require systemic remediation across compartmentation, fire doors, cavity barriers, or fire-rated ductwork.
The financial exposure from that remediation is real and often underestimated. Replacing or upgrading fire doors and compartmentation across a multi-let or high-rise asset is disruptive as well as costly. Works often require access through occupied units, phased isolation of fire compartments, and coordination with tenants and facilities teams.
Unbudgeted capex, extended void periods, insurance implications, and reputational exposure with tenants all feed directly into underwritten returns.
Specialist fire-safety and condition surveys give investors something a paper trail cannot: a physical audit of what is actually installed against what is documented, assessed by a competent, third-party-accredited surveyor rather than relied upon at face value.
That audit produces defensible data, defect schedules, indicative remediation costs, and remaining service life that can be used directly to inform valuation, negotiate price adjustments or retentions, and set realistic conditions precedent or warranty positions ahead of exchange.
The underlying discipline is straightforward: verify that what is on site matches what is on record, and that ongoing maintenance regimes are actually being discharged, not just documented. For investors holding or acquiring significant real estate portfolios, the cost of that verification is marginal against asset value, and against the scale of liability it can uncover.
Robust technical due diligence at acquisition is what protects long-term asset value, tenant safety, and investment performance from a risk that otherwise stays hidden until it is expensive to fix.
(The author is Founder & Managing Director, The FDI Group.)
