Dubai South (Dubai World Central)

Dubai South is the city's long game. It was master-planned around the second airport at Jebel Ali, the one meant to become the world's largest, and around the site that hosted the world's fair and is now Expo City, and it is being built out across a very large stretch of land on the city's southern edge. What exists today is a set of new residential districts, a golf community, a Metro station at Expo City and the airport's first terminals, and prices for new townhouses and flats that the rest of the city cannot match. DWC stands for Dubai World Central, the district's name until it was renamed Dubai South in 2015, and still the code of its airport.

The place

The district lies south of Jebel Ali, between Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road and the airport, with Expo City, which has its own guide, on its northern edge. Its residential quarters are separate developments a short drive apart: the master developer's own district of apartments and townhouses, Emaar's golf community with its villas, townhouses and flats around a course, and a growing number of developer-led projects, some of them with lagoons and beaches of their own, on the land between. The airport, the logistics zones and Expo City are the district's employers.

Expo City is the district's other anchor: the site of the world's fair, kept as a district of offices, parks, museums and homes, with the Metro's terminus and the district's best restaurants. It has its own guide. For Dubai South's residents it is the high street and the weekend, a short drive from every quarter, and it is the reason the district has more life today than its age would suggest.

It is a place of wide roads, new buildings and open land, and it will look different every year for a long time.

What you get

Everything, and all of it new: townhouses and villas in the golf community and the developer projects, apartments in the master developer's district and along the main roads, and, increasingly, larger houses on the lagoon developments. The golf community's homes are Emaar's standard product and trade accordingly; the other projects vary by developer. There is little that is more than a few years old.

Position is the thing to learn: the golf community and the district's own quarter are settled, the newer projects are handing over, and some of the land between them is still sand.

Getting around

The Metro's line to Expo City is the district's one rail link, and it reaches the Marina and the city in a reasonable run; for most of the district it is a drive to the station. By road, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road and Emirates Road connect the district to everywhere, and the airport is at the door. The Marina and the Media City offices are a manageable commute outside the peak; Downtown is long and the old airport longer. Inside the districts the roads are new, wide and quiet.

Day to day

The golf community and the master developer's quarter each have their own retail centres with a supermarket, cafes and the daily services, and Expo City's shops, restaurants and parks are a short drive. The larger malls are further. Schools have opened inside the district and more are promised, with nurseries in the residential quarters; families here plan around the car. The golf course, the parks and, in the newer projects, the lagoons carry the weekends.

Who it suits

People who work at the airport, the free zones, Expo City or the port and want a new home minutes from the desk. First-time buyers and young families who want a townhouse or a new flat at the city's lowest prices for new stock. Investors taking the long view on the airport's growth, of whom there are many.

It suits people less well who work in the centre, who want an established neighbourhood, or who want the district finished: this is the city's largest construction site and will be for years.

Buying and renting here

Two markets run at once and the register keeps them apart. The golf community and the settled quarters trade as ordinary resales of finished homes, with a growing record. Much of the rest trades as off-plan resales, where a launch price for a project handing over in a few years says nothing about a finished home's worth today; the tables on this page show both, separately. The register files a house sold with its plot against the plot, and this page reads those sales correctly.

The developers here range from the city's most established to the newest, and the difference matters more than anywhere else in this guide: a launch price says nothing about a developer's record of finishing what it launched. Buyers should read what the same developer's finished projects elsewhere actually fetched, on their own pages, before paying for a plan.

Buyers off-plan should know the handover date, the payment plan remaining and the developer's record; buyers of finished homes should look at what the same layouts actually fetched on the project's page. For tenants, the official index caps a renewal while a new lease follows the market, and the district's rents are among the city's lowest for new stock.

Projects to know

Emaar's golf community and the master developer's own residential quarter are the district's settled core; the lagoon developments and the projects along the main roads are its new frontier. The table below shows where the district's sales are actually happening, and every project has its own page with every recorded price.