About Villavow

Why Villavow exists

Villavow is an independent UAE real-estate knowledge base: fees, laws, processes, mortgages, Ejari, Golden Visa and 86 area guides — built on analysis of 12.1 million real search queries. We built it because UAE property information online is dominated by two extremes: listing portals optimised for enquiries, and social-media noise optimised for attention. Almost nothing in between respected the reader’s actual questions. A tenant facing an eviction letter, a first-time buyer staring at a Form F, or an overseas investor trying to understand the Golden Visa threshold all deserve answers that are precise, sourced and free of a sales agenda.

The UAE property market — spanning Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the Northern Emirates — runs on precise statutory frameworks: Dubai’s Law No. (26) of 2007 and its amendment Law No. (33) of 2008 govern tenancy; Decree No. (43) of 2013 sets rent-increase caps; Abu Dhabi’s Law No. (20) of 2006 does the same there. Yet the practical details — what a fee costs, which notice period applies, who pays the transfer charge — are scattered across government portals, trustee offices and forum folklore. Our job is to close that gap honestly.

Our method: demand decides the table of contents

Our method is unusual and entirely deliberate. We started with 12M real search queries — the exact words residents, investors and renters type — clustered them into 42 topics and 86 communities, and then wrote the guides people were demonstrably asking for. Demand decides what we cover; editorial standards decide what survives review. The result is a corpus that answers real questions in the words real people use, from “how do I renew my Ejari?” to “what does a Golden Visa actually cost?”

We publish no listings and take no commissions. That independence is the point: when a guide says a community’s service charges are high or that a deal sequence looks wrong, there is no inventory to protect. Where a number matters — the flat 4% DLD transfer fee, the 0.25% + AED 290 mortgage registration, the AED 2 million Golden Visa threshold — we anchor it to the official tariff and tell you exactly which authority to re-verify with, because rules change and honest guides admit it.

Editorial standards and verification

Every guide is checked against primary sources before publication: official gazette texts, the Dubai Land Department and RERA portals, Abu Dhabi’s ADREC and TAMM services, the GDRFA for visa rules, and emirate municipality tariff pages. Fee breakdowns — Ejari charges, trustee office fees, title-deed issuance — are re-audited against the live government channels, and when a schedule changes we update the page and say so. Each guide carries a citation box naming its official sources, and our editorial policy spells out how corrections work: if something here is wrong or outdated, we re-verify against the official source and fix it in the open.

Our research operations are led by Tasleem Akhtar, our lead real-estate data analyst, who specialises in DLD transaction data, RERA dispute frameworks and expat acquisition structures, supported by a small editorial team of UAE-focused researchers. Subject-matter accountability sits with named people, not with a faceless “content team”.

How Villavow is funded

Every guide, calculator, trend dataset and area page on Villavow is free to read — no paywall, no registration wall. The operation is sustained by advertising. Advertisers have no influence over what we publish, which fees we flag as high, or which developers and brokers we criticise; if a commercial relationship ever did touch editorial, we would disclose it on the page itself. That separation is written into our editorial policy, and we hold ourselves to it.

See the data for yourself

Transparency is easier when the receipts are public. The full accounting of our corpus — every source file, every category, what is published and what is held in reserve — is open on our data & sources page. If you spot an error, a stale fee or a missing sub-topic, tell us: corrections get priority, and we re-verify every claim against the official source before responding.