Data sources

01 · The spine

Registry sources

These are the only inputs to a Ridge grade and to the price indices. Each is a public record published by the registry that holds it.

• Dubai Land Department open data · registered sale transactions

  Dubai

  Publisher

  Dubai Land Department (DLD), through its open-data gateway and the Digital Dubai (data.dubai) feed named in /api/index

  What Ridge takes

  Every registered residential Sell transaction, apartments and villas: date, community, project, building, price, area, bedrooms, off-plan flag

  Used for

  The liquidity grade (secondary resales), the maturity discount (off-plan denominator), the Ridge Dubai Resale Price Index (RDRPI) 2002 onward, the stratified RDRI and ROPI, sale PSF, the coverage reconciliation

  Refresh

  Nightly pull of new registrations into the warehouse; every derived figure recomputed and integrity-gated before publication

  Redistributed

  Yes, as Ridge-derived aggregates in the Enterprise API (ratings, buildings, index, history). Raw registry rows are not re-served; they remain available from DLD

• DLD off-plan registrations and the project register

  Dubai

  Publisher

  Dubai Land Department; the Digital Dubai projects dataset

  What Ridge takes

  Off-plan (primary) sales from the same transactions feed, and the registered project pipeline: developer, project, status, completion

  Used for

  The maturity denominator only (never counted as liquidity), the off-plan price and ROPI, the off-plan pipeline and developer track records

  Refresh

  Nightly with the transactions pull; project register daily

  Redistributed

  Yes, as aggregates: developer track records and the off-plan share on each rating

• Ejari registered leases

  Dubai

  Publisher

  Dubai Land Department rent-contracts open API (Ejari), via data.dubai

  What Ridge takes

  Registered residential lease contracts: annual rent, area, property type, community, new versus renewal

  Used for

  Median rent PSF per community and type, gross yield, the Ridge Rent Index (new versus renewal). Never a grade input

  Refresh

  Weekly re-pull of rent levels

  Redistributed

  Yes, as aggregates: yields and the rent index in the Enterprise API

• Mollak service charges

  Dubai

  Publisher

  Dubai Land Department owners-association service-charge budgets (Mollak), via data.dubai

  What Ridge takes

  Approved service-charge rates per building, AED per square foot per year, recurring occupancy categories only

  Used for

  Net yield = (rent PSF − service-charge PSF) ÷ sale PSF. The dataset is a frozen snapshot, so every figure is labelled with its budget year

  Refresh

  Weekly check; advances when the registry reloads the table

  Redistributed

  Yes, as the net-yield aggregate

• Abu Dhabi Real Estate Centre (ADREC) transactions

  Abu Dhabi · preview

  Publisher

  Abu Dhabi Real Estate Centre; currently reached through a bridge feed with the same primary/secondary distinction the grade needs

  What Ridge takes

  Registered sale transactions by district and project, flagged primary (off-plan) or secondary (resale)

  Used for

  Abu Dhabi community and building grades on the identical Dubai rule, labelled preview. No rent or service-charge feed exists yet, so no Abu Dhabi yields are published

  Refresh

  Nightly

  Redistributed

  Not in the Enterprise API v1 datasets; shown on /abudhabi

• Ajman open registry aggregates

  Ajman · liquidity beta

  Publisher

  data.ajman.ae, real-estate unit transactions dataset, published under CC BY 4.0

  What Ridge takes

  Quarterly transaction counts per project, district, unit type and rooms; values are not published, so no prices

  Used for

  A liquidity-only tiering on /ajman, deliberately not on the Ridge Aaa–Caa scale

  Refresh

  Weekly check of a quarterly source

  Redistributed

  No

02 · Context, labelled

Context sources

These feed the surfaces around a rating: maps, location indices and asking-side surveillance. None of them enters a grade or an index.

• Google Maps Platform

  Web UI only

  What Ridge takes

  The basemap on /map (the only page that loads the Maps SDK), building geocodes, traffic-aware drive times and a weighted count of everyday places within 1.5 km of each community centre

  Used for

  The Ridge Accessibility and Ridge Amenity indices, stored as Ridge's own 0–100 scores only; they feed the Investment Grade and are shown beside the liquidity grade, never inside it

  Redistributed

  No. Google-derived layers are web-UI only and are excluded from the Enterprise API feed by the server itself

• MapLibre GL

  Rendering library

  What it is

  An open-source map-rendering library, self-hosted by Ridge; it renders vector layers and carries no data of its own

  Redistributed

  Not applicable

• Asking-side listings (PropertyFinder)

  Surveillance only · paused

  Status

  Paused. Every figure built on listings is withheld while the listings feed is restored

  What Ridge takes

  For-sale and for-rent listings per community: counts, asking prices and rents, days on market, price cuts

  Used for

  Exit pressure (listings versus registered resales), asking yields set against registry yields, the adverse-selection test, and listing depth for the emirates without a transaction registry (Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain, Fujairah). Every asking-side figure carries the label

  Redistributed

  No. Never in the Enterprise API; never a grade or index input (see the firewall below)

03 · Hard rule

The asking-side firewall

No asking-side signal — gap, inventory, asking momentum or any listings-derived measure — ever enters a Ridge grade or a Ridge index. Such signals are surveillance: they can bring a review forward, never move its outcome. The rule is enforced mechanically: on every refresh the publish gate checks the ratings and index source strings for asking-side provenance and refuses to publish if it finds any. The rule is stated in the methodology and the governance charter.

04 · The licensed feed

What is redistributed

The Enterprise API (/api/v1) serves registry-sourced and Ridge-derived datasets only. Third-party-licensed layers stay in the web interface.

Not redistributed: raw registry rows, Google-derived location layers, asking-side listings data, the Abu Dhabi preview and the Ajman beta. Licence scope, permitted onward use and the terms attached to each dataset are stated per dataset in the Enterprise agreement. Ridge makes no claim about the licence terms of the underlying public sources beyond what those sources publish themselves.

05 · Citation

Attribution

Ridge outputs carry the attribution used across the site and the API: "© Ridge Ratings. Underlying registry data © Dubai Land Department, Government of Dubai." Figures cite their source as Dubai Land Department open data with the Ridge methodology version (v1.5). Abu Dhabi figures carry "Abu Dhabi Real Estate Centre (ADREC) · preview"; Ajman figures carry "data.ajman.ae · CC BY 4.0"; map tiles carry the map provider's own notice. A Rating Report is cited by its Report ID and methodology version, as set out in the IP and legal notice.

Ridge Ratings is independent and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Dubai Land Department or the Government of Dubai. Naming a source credits it; it does not imply that the source reviewed or approved a Ridge grade or index.