Who Owns Emaar Properties Now, and What Its Filings Show on Delivery

Emaar Properties changed controlling shareholder on 12 May 2026, and most published profiles of the company have not caught up. The Government of Dubai's media office confirmed that day that Dubai Holding had acquired Investment Corporation of Dubai's 22.27 percent stake, lifting Dubai Holding's total holding to 29.73 percent and making it the largest shareholder. Emaar's own audited accounts, signed three months earlier, still describe ICD as the shareholder with significant influence. Both statements were accurate when made. Anyone doing diligence on Emaar needs to know which one is current.

That gap between what a company filed in February and what happened in May is a good illustration of why buyer research on a listed developer works differently from research on a private one. With Emaar Properties, almost everything that matters is on the public record somewhere, and the work is knowing which record to open.

The corporate identity, precisely

Emaar Properties Public Joint Stock Company was established on 23 June 1997 by Ministerial Decree number 66 of 1997 and commenced operations on 29 July 1997. Its registered office is P.O. Box 9440, Dubai. Its shares trade on the Dubai Financial Market under the ticker EMAAR, on issued capital of 8,838,789,849 shares of one dirham each. Market capitalisation at 31 December 2025 was AED 124.2 billion.

The residential development business sits in a separately listed subsidiary. Emaar Development PJSC was approved as a public joint stock company by the Securities and Commodities Authority on 20 November 2017 and began trading on 22 November 2017 after an IPO of roughly 20 percent of its capital at AED 6.03 a share. Emaar Properties holds an effective 80.16 percent of it. When a buyer signs a sale and purchase agreement for a Dubai apartment marketed under the Emaar name, the counterparty is usually an Emaar Development entity rather than Emaar Properties itself, and the two file separate audited accounts.

The shareholding, and how it moved

Annex I of the Emaar Properties integrated annual report for 2025 lists two holders above 5 percent at 31 December 2025. ICD held 1,968,605,691 shares, or 22.272 percent. An entity named EITL DIFC SPC 1 LTD held 659,050,967 shares, or 7.456 percent. The report identifies the second holder as a Dubai Holding group entity and puts the free float at roughly 70.2 percent across 50,788 shareholders.

The arithmetic ties the 2026 transaction back to a 2022 one. Dubai Holding's original stake came from the sale of Dubai Creek Harbour to Emaar, announced on 11 August 2022 at AED 7.5 billion and settled half in cash and half in new Emaar shares issued on 22 December 2022 at AED 4.69 a share, a transaction disclosed in note 28 of the audited accounts. Add that 7.456 percent to the 22.272 percent bought from ICD and the result is 29.728 percent, which reconciles exactly to the 29.73 percent Dubai Holding announced. The free float did not change. What changed is who sits behind it.

One board seat makes the relationship concrete. Omar Karim, an Emaar Properties director, is Group Chief Investment Officer of Dubai Holding and chief executive of Dubai Holding Investments, per the director biographies in the 2025 report. The Emaar Properties board elected at the annual general meeting of 22 April 2024 and named in the signed FY2025 directors' report is chaired by Jamal Bin Theniyah, with Ahmed Jawa as vice chairman and Mohamed Ali Alabbar as managing director. Amit Jain has been group chief executive since 1 May 2006.

What the delivery record actually says

Emaar Properties reported total revenue of AED 49.56 billion for 2025 against AED 35.50 billion in 2024, property sales of AED 80.4 billion, and a revenue backlog of about AED 155 billion at year end. Emaar Development reported AED 71.1 billion of property sales, a backlog of AED 125 billion, roughly 51,000 units under construction and more than 80,500 units delivered since 2002. In the first half of 2026 the group reported AED 23.9 billion of revenue and a backlog of AED 164.9 billion.

Delivery counts are worth reading carefully, because the disclosure is uneven. The 2025 report gives a clean figure of 6,129 units delivered in the UAE that year, plus about 1,080 internationally. There is no equivalent per-year figure disclosed for 2024, only a cumulative "74,000 plus since inception," and the 2023 number of "over 12,000 units" is group wide and therefore not comparable with the UAE-only 2025 figure. Emaar has not published a units-delivered figure for the first half of 2026. A year-on-year delivery trend line for this company would have to be constructed rather than reported, and buyers should be sceptical of any published one.

The clearest sourced delay concerns Dubai Creek Tower. The project was unveiled before the pandemic and then paused for a design revision. Speaking at the Dubai International Project Management Forum on 14 January 2026, Alabbar said the tender for the tower would be offered in three months and that the design had been changed. As of September 2026 no main contractor award has been publicly recorded. Emaar's audited accounts disclose no cancelled projects, and no DLD, RERA or Securities and Commodities Authority enforcement action against either listed entity appears in the public record, though a search returning nothing is not the same as a regulator confirming nothing exists.

The disclosed litigation is entirely Indian. Note 30(b) of the 2025 accounts sets out the Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation petition before the National Company Law Tribunal in Hyderabad under sections 241 and 242 of India's Companies Act 2013, decided on maintainability in TSIIC's favour on 25 July 2022 and still pending final adjudication, and a Commonwealth Games Village arbitration in which Emaar MGF Construction has claimed INR 14,182 million against a Delhi Development Authority counter-claim of INR 14,460 million.

The three checks a buyer can run

Emaar is one of the few Dubai developers where a project can be triangulated against three independent layers, and the framework applies to any developer selling off-plan in the emirate.

The first layer is the regulator. Dubai's Project Status Enquiry service, delivered through the DUBAI REST app, returns the project number, unit count, completion status, start and completion dates, the developer's details and the name of the escrow account bank for any registered project. Under article 4 of Law No. 8 of 2007 concerning escrow accounts for real estate development, a developer must be recorded in the Register of Real Estate Developers before developing, and article 14 requires the escrow agent to retain 5 percent of the account value for a year after the completion certificate. Article 3(1) of Law No. 13 of 2008 regulating the interim property register is blunter still: an off-plan disposition that is not entered in that register is void. Note that Law No. 6 of 2023 is sometimes cited as escrow legislation and is not. It establishes the Dubai Business Registration and Licensing Corporation. The framework itself is set out in more detail in our explainer on how RERA and the DLD actually work.

The second layer is the audit. Note 10 of the 2025 accounts records AED 42.88 billion of customer advances held in escrow accounts across the group, and note 30(a) discloses an AED 9.0 billion performance guarantee provided to RERA in accordance with its regulations. Those are hard numbers signed off by an external auditor, which is more than a privately held developer will ever give you.

The third layer is continuous disclosure. As a listed company Emaar reports under Securities and Commodities Authority Resolution No. 3/R.M. of 2020, which is why figures like Emaar Development's customer default rate of 0.5 percent of sales value are public at all.

None of that is a recommendation. A large balance sheet does not guarantee a handover date, and the Creek Tower timeline shows a well-capitalised developer can still leave a flagship project sitting. What it means is that the evidence exists, which is the precondition for checking anything. Bektu (https://bektu.com) exists to make that delivery history comparable across developers, and Emaar's company page sits at bektu.com/companies/emaar-properties. For the steps to run before transferring money, see our guide to verifying a Dubai developer before you wire funds.