Selling a Dubai Property You Own With Someone Else

Two friends buy an apartment together. A married couple registers a villa in both names. Three siblings inherit a property from a parent. Years pass, circumstances diverge, and one of them wants out while the others do not.

This is one of the most common property situations in Dubai and one of the least written about. The guides cover buying, selling, renting, mortgaging and disputing with a landlord. Almost none of them cover the moment when the obstacle to a sale is the person whose name sits next to yours on the title deed.

First, a Terminology Trap That Sends People to the Wrong Law

Search for "jointly owned property Dubai" and you will land on Law No. 6 of 2019 Concerning the Ownership of Jointly Owned Real Property, owners associations, management entities, common areas and service charges.

That is not your situation. In Dubai's legal vocabulary, jointly owned property means a strata building, where many owners hold units and share the common parts. It is the law of corridors, lifts, pools and Mollak.

What you have is common ownership in undivided shares: two or more people who together own one unit, each holding a percentage of the whole rather than a physical part of it. Nobody owns the bedroom. Each owner owns a fraction of everything. That relationship is governed by the general civil law, which since 1 June 2026 means the Civil Transactions Law issued by Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025, not by Law No. 6 of 2019.

Getting this wrong wastes weeks. An owners association has no role whatsoever in a dispute between two people who own one flat.

What Your Title Deed Actually Says

Start with the document, because people are routinely wrong about their own position.

A Dubai title deed names every owner and states each one's share. Those shares do not have to be equal and frequently are not, particularly where one party funded more of the purchase or where a property has passed through a succession. A deed may read 50 and 50, or 70 and 30, or thirds that do not divide cleanly.

The share percentage is what you own, what you can sell, what you are entitled to out of the proceeds and what your vote is worth in a decision about the property. It is not affected by who lives there, who pays the service charge, who has been paying the mortgage or whose furniture is in the living room. Those facts may give rise to a claim between the owners. They do not change the register.

Pull a current title deed before any conversation. Half of these disputes evaporate when both parties read the percentages.

Selling the Whole Unit Takes Everybody

A sale of the entire property is a decision for all the owners together, and in practice that means every owner on the deed either attends the trustee office or is properly represented.

The sequence is the ordinary Dubai one with an extra signature at every stage. The listing form that permits advertising has to reflect the owners. The Form F has to be signed by all of them. The developer NOC is issued for the unit. At transfer, every registered owner must appear at the registration trustee office with original identification, or be represented under a power of attorney that the Land Department will accept.

That power of attorney is where overseas co-owners derail timelines. A POA executed abroad needs notarisation, legalisation through the UAE embassy chain or an apostille depending on the country, a legal translation into Arabic, and wording broad enough to cover a sale and a transfer of title. The archive's guide to powers of attorney for Dubai property covers the mechanics properly. Start it the week you agree to sell, not the week before transfer.

One useful consequence of all this: no co-owner can sell the whole property behind the others' backs. The register will not permit it. Whatever else is going wrong, that particular fear is unfounded.

Selling Only Your Share

Here the answer surprises people, and it comes from the general law rather than from anything Dubai-specific.

A co-owner may dispose of, use and exploit his own share without needing permission from the other co-owners, provided he does not harm their rights. Your share is your property. You do not need anybody's consent to sell it.

Two things immediately qualify that freedom, and both matter more than the principle.

The market for a share is close to non-existent. Almost nobody wants to buy 40% of an apartment occupied by a stranger, with no right to any particular room and no control over the sale of the rest. Where such a buyer does exist, the price reflects the position, which is a discount so steep that the route is usually worse than any negotiated outcome.

A co-owner has a pre-emption right. The Civil Transactions Law's pre-emption provisions, beginning at Article 1171, give a co-owner holding an undivided share in immovable property the right to take a share disposed of by another co-owner. The procedure and the time limits attached to it are strict, and how that interacts with a Land Department registration in practice is a question for a lawyer rather than a guide. The practical lesson is the simpler one: offer your share to your co-owners first, in writing. It is both the commercially sensible move and the one that avoids a fight about whether a right was bypassed.

When a Co-Owner Refuses: Four Routes

Take them in order of cost, because the cheapest one resolves most cases.

Agree a buyout. One owner buys the other's share at an agreed value, usually set by an independent valuation rather than by argument. Registered at the Land Department as a transfer of a share, with the 4% transfer fee calculated on the value of the share being transferred rather than on the whole property, plus the AED 580 admin charge and the trustee office fee. Where the parties are first-degree relatives a gift transfer at the reduced rate may be available instead, which the archive's guide to gifting property between family members sets out.

Sell your share to your co-owner on terms. A variant of the above where the price is less important to you than the exit, often structured with instalments and a registered security. It is a negotiation, not a process.

Partition in kind. Dividing the property itself between the owners. Realistic for land, for a plot with more than one building, or for a portfolio of several units held together. Essentially impossible for a single apartment, which cannot be cut in half without destroying it.

Ask the court. This is the route that surprises people, and it is the reason a refusing co-owner has less leverage than they think.

The Civil Transactions Law provides that every co-owner may demand partition of commonly owned property unless bound to remain in co-ownership by law or by agreement, and that an agreement to remain in co-ownership may not exceed five years. The right to get out is the default, and it cannot be contracted away indefinitely.

Where partition in kind is impossible, or would cause significant harm or a significant loss of value, Article 1067 of the law allows a co-owner to sell his share to another co-owner or to ask the court to sell it, and where selling individual shares does not resolve matters, to ask for the sale of the entire property with the proceeds distributed in proportion to the shares.

In plain terms: nobody can be forced to stay a co-owner forever. A co-owner who refuses every reasonable offer is not holding a veto, they are choosing a slower and more expensive version of the same outcome, with legal costs coming out of a pot that is partly theirs. Saying that calmly, early, and in writing resolves a great many of these situations without anyone filing anything.

The Complications That Actually Bite

Three practical problems recur, and none of them is about the law of partition.

A mortgage over the unit freezes everything. Where the property is mortgaged, Dubai's mortgage law requires the mortgagee's approval for any disposal, and the transferee must accept the transfer of the mortgagor's obligations. A share cannot be sold or bought out around a bank. The bank's position has to be resolved first, which in practice means settlement and release, or a refinance in the continuing owner's sole name, subject to that owner qualifying on their own income. Test that affordability before negotiating a buyout price, because a buyout the remaining owner cannot finance is not an agreement, it is a delay.

Service charges are billed against the unit, not against the owners. The management company does not care which of you agreed to pay. Arrears sit on the property, block the clearance the NOC depends on, and therefore block the sale that would have ended the dispute. If a co-owner has stopped contributing, paying the arrears yourself to unblock a sale is usually the right commercial decision, documented at the time as a contribution to be recovered from the proceeds.

Occupation without contribution. One owner lives in the property rent-free while the other pays half the costs for nothing. That is a claim between the owners rather than something the register will fix, and it is almost always better resolved as a line in a buyout calculation than as separate litigation.

The Document That Would Have Prevented All of This

If you are reading this before buying with somebody rather than after, there is one thing to do.

Sign a co-ownership agreement at the same time as the purchase. It should record the shares and what they are based on, who pays the mortgage, the service charge and the maintenance, what happens if one party cannot pay, how the property is valued if one wants out, how long the other has to buy them out, and what happens if neither will buy and neither will sell.

The provision that does the most work is the simplest. One owner names a price per share. The other then chooses whether to buy at that price or sell at that price. It makes an unfair price self-defeating and ends almost every deadlock without a valuer or a court.

Bear in mind that an agreement to remain in co-ownership cannot bind for more than five years, so a clause locking everyone in for a decade is not the protection it appears to be. And have the agreement reviewed by a UAE-qualified lawyer, because a document that contradicts the general law is worth less than no document at all.

The Short Version

Owning a Dubai property with somebody else is common ownership in undivided shares, governed by the Civil Transactions Law, and not the "jointly owned property" of Law No. 6 of 2019, which is strata law about common areas. Your title deed states each owner's percentage, and that percentage is what you own and what you receive. Selling the whole unit requires every owner, in person or under a properly legalised power of attorney, so no co-owner can sell behind another's back. Selling your own share needs nobody's permission, but the market for a share is poor and a co-owner holds a pre-emption right under the provisions beginning at Article 1171, so offer it to them first and in writing. Where a co-owner refuses, the routes are a negotiated buyout, a sale of your share to them, partition in kind where the asset allows it, and finally the court, which can order a sale because no one may be compelled to remain a co-owner and an agreement to do so cannot exceed five years. A mortgage must be resolved with the bank before any share moves, and service charge arrears will block the NOC regardless of who caused them. A co-ownership agreement signed at purchase, with a price-setting buy-or-sell clause, prevents nearly all of it.