06/10/2026
The yield figure in the brochure is gross. The number that reaches your account is not.
Short let or long let is the question every investor asks, and the honest answer is that it depends on costs almost nobody lists.
Short let, holiday home style:
You need a permit. Short-term rentals in Dubai have to be registered and licensed. Operating without one is not a grey area.
The unit has to be furnished to a standard guests will book, and refreshed as it wears.
You absorb everything a tenant would normally cover. Utilities, internet, cleaning between stays, consumables, linen.
Management takes a percentage of revenue. Ask for the exact figure, in writing, including what is excluded from it.
Occupancy is never 100%. Dubai has a real seasonal curve, and summer is not peak. A yield built on year-round full occupancy is a sales figure, not a forecast.
Long let, standard tenancy:
Lower gross, far fewer moving parts. The tenancy is registered through Ejari, the tenant pays their own DEWA and internet, and you are not refurnishing or restocking anything.
Your risk is concentrated in voids and in the tenant, rather than spread across a hundred short stays.
Both carry the same service charge, every year, regardless of whether the unit earned anything.
The only comparison worth making is net against net. Gross yield on a short let will almost always look better on a slide and often finishes lower once the costs are counted. Sometimes it finishes higher. You cannot know which without running the actual numbers for the actual unit.
Ask any agent projecting a yield to show you the net, the assumed occupancy, and what is excluded. If they cannot, the figure was decoration.
Send us a unit and we will run both scenarios properly, including the parts that reduce the number.
CONTACT: +971 50 940 1777 | +971 56 708 4819
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