Dubai Sports City

Dubai Sports City is a community built around stadiums that became a suburb. It was planned as the city's sporting quarter, with a cricket ground, a golf course, academies and arenas, and the homes that were meant to house the athletes and the fans filled instead with families and tenants who wanted a mid-rise flat or a villa near the Marina end of the city at a price the Marina could not offer. The stadium still hosts the big matches; the rest of the time it is a quiet, green, slightly unfinished place to live.

The place

The community lies between Hessa Street and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road, with Motor City, Jumeirah Village Circle and Dubai Production City around it and Tilal Al Ghaf across the road. The cricket stadium and the golf course are its landmarks; the golf club's villa neighbourhood, with its own school and clubhouse, is its top end; and the apartment buildings, mid-rise and high-rise from many developers, line the community's main roads and the edges of the course. Some plots are still empty and construction continues.

What you get

Apartments from studios to family layouts in buildings that vary widely by developer, several of them facing the course; villas and townhouses in the golf neighbourhood, now mature; and a few townhouse clusters elsewhere. The apartment buildings are the volume and differ in finish, management and parking to a degree the register records plainly.

Who it suits

Families who want a villa on a golf course with a school inside the gate at prices below the coast. Tenants and buyers of apartments who want green and a pool near the Marina at a modest rent. Sports people, for whom the academies and the courses are the reason. Investors in the apartment buildings, whose yields have been steady.

It suits people less well who want public transport, a finished community or a short run to Downtown.

Buying and renting here

The register separates the golf neighbourhood's villas, which trade as a settled market, from the apartment buildings, which trade tower by tower; the tables on this page show both, and every building and project has its own page with what its layouts actually fetched. Buyers of apartments should read the owners' association and the service charge before the price. Off-plan launches continue and are kept apart from resales here. For tenants, the official index caps a renewal while a new lease follows the market.