By James Sahota, CEO of Veer & Sant. Over 20 years in property, first in the UK and now in Dubai.

If you’re in the UK and you’ve been looking at Dubai thinking “why not me?”, this is for you. Specifically, it’s for the person who’s going to do it properly: leave the job, leave the house, and reroute the family. If you want to become a real estate agent in Dubai, the first thing I’d ask you isn’t about sales. It’s about money. How long can you live with nothing coming in?

Our own careers guide at Veer & Sant says bring six months. I’m going to tell you something slightly different. I’d bring twelve.

Not because it takes a year to earn anything. Most new brokers see their first commission somewhere between month three and month six. I’m saying twelve because I see it time and time again: people don’t fail in this job because they’re bad at it. They fail because they ran out of runway before the work had time to pay.

Why most people who become a real estate agent in Dubai give up too early

Every role at our firm is commission only. No basic salary. No sales, no pay. We put that on page two of our guide because the people we want don’t flinch when they read it.

Here’s what commission only actually means in your first year. On a resale, you get paid at transfer, which is weeks after the client says yes. On off-plan, the developer pays the commission, often in stages. So even when you’ve done the deal, the money can be some way behind it.

Now put that next to rent, school fees, a car and a family who’ve just moved four thousand miles. If your savings are built for six months and the first proper deal lands in month five, you spend month four panicking. And a broker who’s panicking chases any deal, pushes clients too hard, and makes the decisions that end careers early.

With a full year behind you, you’re not under pressure. You can do it properly. That’s the whole argument.

Your first year, quarter by quarter

This is how I’d tell anyone to plan it. It isn’t a promise, and some people move faster. But it’s an honest map of how the year usually goes.

Months 1 to 3: Learn the job

Use the first three months to really grasp the training, study the market and get the foundations right. At our place that starts with a five-day Foundation Course, in the room with me and Benny: the Dubai market, our sales process, scripts, objection handling, the CRM and live call blocks. Then we take you through the RERA course and exam so you’re licensed to trade.

The reason I run it myself is simple. For a long time I assumed that what I knew, other people would just know. That isn’t how it works. Twenty years of experience doesn’t come out of your brain and go straight into someone else’s. So it’s written down, it’s taught properly, and there’s a training portal you can go back to at eleven at night when you can’t remember what I said on day three about a property that three other agents are already listing.

The standard from day one: in at 8:30, a hundred calls a day, every conversation logged in the CRM. Calling still works. It just doesn’t work unless someone gives you the foundations first.

Months 4 to 6: Become the specialist

Now you pick an area and you make it yours. You’re doing the calls, you’re getting the listings, you’re getting known.

When I train new agents, I pull up the profiles of the best brokers in Dubai, including people at other firms, and I ask the room one question: what do you see? The same area. Listing after listing after listing in one place. And then the sales: a deal this week, this week, this week. It’s simple maths. The focused agent wins.

One of the best was given to me in my first month here, by a head of sales who sat me down and said: you’ve got a shop on Property Finder, and one on Bayut and Dubizzle. If your shop’s got no stock in it, nobody’s coming in and nobody’s buying. Price it too cheap and people think something’s wrong. Price it too high and it won’t sell. Keep your shop full and priced right, and you’ll keep doing business. Our standard is twenty live listings at all times. That’s the shop.

Months 7 to 9: Start transacting

This is where it starts to turn. The listings are there, so the calls come. The calls come, so the viewings happen. The viewings happen, so the offers come. The offers come, and you do a deal.

It’s also where you learn the thing most agents never learn: you don’t lose deals because you’re bad, you lose them because you forgot. Someone mentions in a coffee shop that their friend’s looking. A buyer tells you they’ll be ready in spring. If it isn’t in your CRM, it’s gone, and in spring you’ll get the phone call nobody wants: “We bought through someone else, because you didn’t call us.” Your CRM is your headquarters. Every conversation goes in it.

Months 10 to 12: Bill consistently

The last three months of the year are where you’re billing, billing, billing, and you can see the money coming in. Not because you got lucky in month ten, but because months one to nine built a pipeline that now pays.

And here’s the mindset I want you to take with you: I’ve got twelve months to make a success of this. If I can get through nine, I’m going to do well.

How much money do you need to become a real estate agent in Dubai?

Let’s be straight about the numbers. Our careers guide puts the floor at about £12,000 for one person, and recommends £17,000 to £25,000 to cover six months on your own: flights, visa, deposits, rent, bills, a car, fuel and tolls, food, the RERA course, a social life and a 10% buffer. The lower end is a flatshare, the upper end is a studio.

Twelve months means you’re starting from roughly double that for one person. If you’re bringing a family, school fees and a bigger home change the maths completely. Don’t guess. Use the broker runway calculator, put your real costs in, and see the number before you book a single flight.

One more thing on money. The UAE doesn’t charge personal income tax, but whether you pay tax at home depends on your residency status. Get proper advice before you move. Anyone who tells you “it’s all tax free” without asking where you’re resident isn’t doing you a favour.

Real estate agent salary in Dubai: what the commission actually looks like

There’s no salary, so the real question is commission. Here’s how a single deal works at a 50% starting split (figures from our careers guide, at £1 = AED 4.86):

• One resale at AED 2 million: 2% commission, AED 20,000 to you. About £4,100.
• One off-plan sale at AED 2 million: developers often pay 4% to 6% on launches, so AED 40,000 to 60,000 to you. About £8,200 to £12,300.

Same sale price, two to three times the pay. That’s one reason off-plan matters so much to a new agent’s year.

Our guide runs two illustrations. A first year where the first deal lands in month four and then one a month after that, nine deals in total, comes to about £61,700. An established broker doing one resale and one off-plan a month for a year, still at a 50% split, comes to about £172,800. Your split rises with your results, from 50% up to 70%. These are illustrations, not averages and not promises. Your results depend on your activity.

In training, we don’t leave this to hope. In your first couple of days we do an exercise where you reverse-engineer your income: say you want half a million dirhams in year one and a million in year two. How many secondary deals is that? How many off-plan? How much from referrals? You walk out knowing exactly what you’re aiming for, instead of going out on the sales floor and seeing what happens.

Is now the right time to move to Dubai and sell property?

Dubai property sales hit a record AED 686.8 billion in 2025, according to the Dubai Land Department, and total real estate transactions passed AED 917 billion. The market is enormous.

But I’m not going to pretend 2026 has been easy. Regional conflict made buyers pause, deals slowed, and a lot of brokers packed up and left. I’ve said it publicly: if you were an average broker when the market was great, right now you’re probably a very bad broker. If you were good, you’re probably average. If you were exceptional, you’re probably good.

That’s exactly why this is a decent moment to start. Everybody’s a good agent when the market’s great. The people who train properly in the quiet are the ones standing in the right place when it turns. Dubai has been here before, after 2008 and again after 2014, and both times it came back. Past performance is no guarantee of the future, but I know which side of the next cycle I’d want to be trained on.

Leave social media until you’ve earned it

A lot of new agents arrive thinking the job is making videos. I’ve done content. It’s produced serious business for me. But it came after the work, not instead of it.

One of the best area specialists I know has 46 listings in one community and posts absolutely nothing on Instagram. He’s still billing huge numbers. He did the raw work: calling, listing, more listings, and staying in one area.

So do the work first. Build your name in an area until it means something. Then go and blow it up on social media, link it back to that area, and watch the reach you get. Social media builds your brand. It can’t build your pipeline for you.

Know why you’re doing it

There are going to be days in this job when you ask yourself why you’re putting yourself through it. We’ve got someone in our office with a picture of her kids on her desk. When things get tough, she looks at it. That’s her why.

Yours might be your family. It might be that you just want to earn a lot of money and be comfortable. Either is fine. Just know what it is before you get here, because you’ll have dark days. Although, like I always say, in Dubai it’s never dark for very long.

Who this isn’t for

Being honest about this saves everyone time. This isn’t for you if you need a guaranteed salary to feel safe, if you lead with cars, watches and “passive income”, if you want to do it your way from day one, or if you’re waiting for the right time. There isn’t one.

It is for you if you’ve been top of the board somewhere “normal” (hospitality, retail, telesales, recruitment) and you’re still on the same money as the person doing half the work. If you’ve stuck at something hard. If you’ve saved, and you’ve actually thought it through.