What a verified project record contains: three grades of truth

Most of what a buyer learns about an off-plan project arrives in one format: a brochure, a sales deck or a message from someone selling it. Registered facts, the developer's commitments and plain sales talk sit side by side in the same typeface, and nothing on the page says which is which. A verified project record exists to undo that. Every statement in it carries three things: a grade, a source and a date. The reader sees not only what is claimed but how much weight the claim will bear, and how fresh it is.

The grades are simple to state and demanding to keep.

Grade one: on the public record

These are facts an authority holds and anyone can check for themselves. For a Dubai off-plan project they include the project's registration and number, its developer, its escrow account and the construction progress the Land Department shows. Dubai REST, the Land Department's app, displays the percentage of completion, actual pictures of the project and the escrow account number for off-plan projects (Dubai Land Department: Dubai REST, accessed 24 September 2026), and the project status enquiry returns the registered, start and completion dates (Dubai Land Department: Project Status Enquiry, accessed 24 September 2026).

The law is what gives these facts their standing. Buyers' payments for off-plan units go into an escrow account opened for the project under Article 7 of Dubai Law No. 8 of 2007 on escrow accounts (accessed 24 September 2026), and an off-plan sale not entered in the interim register is void under Article 3 of Dubai Law No. 13 of 2008 on the Interim Property Register (accessed 24 September 2026).

Grade-one facts are the strongest a record can carry, but they are not timeless. A completion percentage is true on the day it was read. So the record stores the date of each reading, and when a new reading arrives it is added beside the old one rather than written over it. A history of readings is what turns a snapshot into a trend.

Grade two: stated by the developer, in writing

Price lists, payment plans, unit availability, specifications, and the handover date in the sale contract. These come from the party doing the selling, so they are claims rather than findings — but they are written, attributable claims that a buyer can hold the developer to. The record keeps the document itself, who issued it and when. When a price list changes, the new one is added and the old one stays, so anyone can see what moved.

The discipline that matters most is never letting a grade-two fact pass as grade one. A handover quarter printed in a brochure and a completion date on the Land Department's project record are different kinds of statement, even when they agree. When they disagree, the record shows both, labelled, and says so.

Grade three: reported

What a sales centre said on the phone, what an agent heard, what a market report asserts. Sometimes accurate, often useful, never verified. A record may hold it — marked as reported, with who reported it and when — and it stays at grade three until it is confirmed by a document or by the public record. It is never quietly promoted.

Why the grade matters as much as the fact

Two records can hold the same sentence and mean different things by it. "Units available" taken from the developer's own inventory this morning and "units available" copied from an old listing are the same words with very different value. Without the grade and the date, a reader cannot tell them apart; with them, the difference is obvious at a glance.

The whole design comes down to three rules. No fact without a source. No source without a date. No grade higher than the evidence supports.

What a record does not do

It does not give advice, predict prices or say whether a project is a good purchase. It shows what is known, how it is known and since when. Gaps stay visible as gaps: a field with no evidence behind it is shown as missing, not filled with an estimate.

Using the grades yourself

The method works without anyone's database. For any project you are weighing:

• For each fact that matters to your decision, ask whether it is on the public record, in a signed document, or only said.
• Check the public-record facts yourself, on the Land Department's project status enquiry or in Dubai REST.
• Ask your trusted partner for the developer's commitments in writing, dated and attributed.
• Treat everything else as reported until it is proven otherwise — and notice how much of the case for buying rests on it.