Glossary

01 · Grades

The Ridge scale

The Ridge grade is an opinion of resale liquidity: how readily a home in a community or building could be resold, measured from registered secondary transactions and discounted for un-handed-over supply. Seven grades from Aaa (deepest) to Caa (thinnest), plus NR. The letters follow the credit-rating convention; a community is graded on an absolute score, a building by its rank among all rated buildings (the two calibrations).

• Aaa

  Deepest, most liquid — a constant stream of resales; exit almost anytime. Community score 84 or above; top 2% of buildings.

• Aa

  Very deep and stable — a strong, reliable resale market. Score 74 or above; next 7% of buildings.

• A

  Established and liquid — sells steadily. Score 64 or above; next 14%.

• Baa

  Solid mid-market — a healthy, working resale market. Score 55 or above; next 22%.

• Ba

  Adequate, thinner — it sells, but with fewer buyers. Score 46 or above; next 25%.

• B

  Shallow — slower to exit; timing matters. Score 38 or above; next 18%.

• Caa

  Thin or early — few resales; hardest to exit. Score below 38; bottom 12%.

• NR

  Not rated — fewer than 5 secondary resales in the window; too thin to grade. Ridge publishes no grade rather than an estimate. A rating that falls below the floor is withdrawn to NR, and re-initiated when resales return.

02 · Inputs and figures

Measures

Liquidity score

The 0–100 number behind the grade: (20 + 7.4 × ln resales) × min(1, 0.6 + 0.4 × maturity), where resales are secondary (ready) transactions in the trailing window. The grade is read off the score by the published bands. Formula.

Secondary (ready) resale

A registered sale of a completed home that already had an owner: the only transactions counted as liquidity. Also called a ready sale.

Off-plan (primary) sale

A registered sale of a unit not yet handed over, typically from the developer. Never counted as liquidity; it enters the grade only as the denominator of the maturity discount and is indexed separately (ROPI).

Maturity

Resales ÷ off-plan sales in the window. Low maturity means new supply dwarfs true resale, and the score is discounted (floor 0.6) so a handover wave cannot masquerade as exitability.

Registered transactionalso: registry print

A transaction recorded in the land registry (Dubai Land Department for Dubai). "Registry print" is the older site term for the same record; the site now says registered transaction. Asking prices are opinions; registry prints are facts.

PSF · AED per square foot

Price divided by registered built-up area, in UAE dirhams. Sale PSF is the median resale PSF of a community or building in the window; villa PSF is the same for villas.

Gross yield

Annual registered rent PSF ÷ sale PSF, from Ejari registered leases and registered sales. Published beside the grade, never inside it.

Net yield

(Annual rent PSF − service-charge PSF) ÷ sale PSF, where the service charge is the building's approved Mollak budget rate. Shown as "—" where coverage is thin.

Asking-side

Any figure derived from property listings rather than the registry: asking prices, asking yields, inventory, exit pressure. Always labelled; never a grade or index input (the firewall). Paused while the listings feed is restored.

Exit pressure · months of inventory

Resale listings ÷ registered monthly resales for a community: how long the current shelf would take to clear at the registered pace. Asking-side, surveillance only; paused while the listings feed is restored.

Ridge Investment Grade

An optional composite on top of the liquidity grade: liquidity 35%, accessibility 22%, amenity 15%, yield 16%, price stability 12%. It never replaces the liquidity grade.

Ridge Accessibility · Ridge Amenity

Location indices from Google Maps Platform data: traffic-aware drive time to Dubai's key hubs, and a weighted count of everyday amenities within 1.5 km, each percentile-ranked into a 0–100 score. Shown beside the grade; web interface only.

Covered · rated · registry shapes

The three counts, never interchanged: covered communities are indexed including NR (174 today); rated communities carry a letter grade (138); registry shapes are cadastral polygons, of which several can roll up into one rated community.

03 · Series

Indices

RDRPIRidge Dubai Resale Price Index

The headline series printed in the band on every page and on /index: the monthly median of registered secondary (resale) AED per square foot, apartments and villas, from 2002 onward, rebased to 2014 = 100. A plain median, not a stratified index. Served at /api/index.

RDRIRidge Dubai Ready Resale Index

The stratified ready-resale series: medians per community × property type × bedrooms stratum, winsorised, combined with fixed base-period weights (Laspeyres-style), base May 2025 = 100, with a bootstrap confidence band. Preliminary. Served at /api/ridge_index. Not the same series as RDRPI.

ROPIRidge Off-Plan Pipeline Index

The stratified companion to RDRI built on off-plan (primary) transactions only, same construction and base. Never blended with RDRI.

Ridge Rent Index

Monthly new-versus-renewal rent PSF from Ejari registered leases.

Confidence · low, moderate, high

The label on each stratified release from its ±1 standard-error band: low when the band is wider than 2.5 index points, moderate above 1.0, otherwise high.

Base · rebased

The month whose value is set to 100. RDRPI: 2014. RDRI and ROPI: the first month of the available window, currently May 2025; the base can move as the window extends, which is why those series are preliminary.

04 · Publication

Prints and status

Index print

One published value of a series for one month, with its month, status and next release date: for example the RDRPI print in the band at the top of this page. Verify this print shows the print's provenance.

Preliminary

A print whose month is still registering, or a stratified series whose base can still move. Values may revise as late registrations land.

Final

A print for a complete month whose values no longer revise under routine late data. Material back-revisions, if ever needed, carry a revision code (revision policy).

Window · data through

The trailing period of registered transactions a figure is computed on (2025-05 → 2026-10 today), and its last month (2026-10). Every rating document states both.

Vintage

The two-digit year and month of the data extraction stamped on a Reference, so two documents on the same subject from different months are never confused.

Reference

The citation key every Ridge rating document prints: Ridge · market · subject · vintage (a building adds its community). It names what was rated and on which data vintage, and it is what "Cite as" lines carry. /verify resolves a Reference against the published record and answers for the subject, the grade and the vintage — it is a published rating reference, not a purchased certificate.

Certificate id

The id of one purchased Rating Report, in the form LR-YYYYMMDD-XXXX. Unlike a Reference it identifies an issued document rather than a published rating, and /verify answers for it as its own class: who it was issued to, when, and the grade it stated.

Methodology version

The published rulebook a figure was computed under, currently v1.5. The log is at /methodology#versions.

Integrity gate

The set of self-checks each refresh must pass before anything is published; the result is shown on /status.

05 · The ledger

Rating actions

Every change of grade is written to the append-only rating ledger and published on The Ridge Wire. Daily confirmations of an unchanged grade are not actions and are not recorded.

Initiated

A community or building receives a letter grade for the first time, or returns from NR to a grade. Never described as an upgrade.

Upgrade

The grade moves to a stronger letter, for example Baa → A, because the registered resale depth or maturity rose.

Downgrade

The grade moves to a weaker letter, for example A → Baa.

Withdrawn

A rated subject falls below the 5-resale floor and returns to NR. The history stays in the ledger.

Review

A re-derivation brought forward by a surveillance signal (asking-side or otherwise). A review can change the timing of an action, never its outcome, which comes only from the registry and the method.

Correction

A new ledger entry that supersedes an earlier one after a factual error; nothing is deleted. Raised through appeals, corrections and complaints.

06 · Nouns

Products

Rating Report

The document Ridge issues for one community or building: seal, rationale, figures, provenance, the subject's Reference and its own certificate id. Ordered from a rating page or through the desk.

Ridge ProTerminal · Screener · Workspace

The professional subscription: the Terminal (a command-line interface to the market tables, the developer registry and permits), the Screener (rated communities matched to an objective, ticket size and risk tolerance) and the Workspace (watchlist, rating-change alerts, exports, Rating Reports and the portfolio marked to the registered record). Ask Ridge, the registry question-and-answer tool, is a Ridge Pro feature.

Enterprise API/api/v1

The licensed data feed: registry-sourced and Ridge-derived datasets in JSON and CSV, key-gated, documented at /api-docs. Sources and what is redistributed: /data-sources.

The Ridge Wire

The public record of rating actions, as a page and an RSS feed; the full history is the actions dataset of the Enterprise API.

Embed

The rating seal and index widgets that can be placed on a third-party page by iframe.

Developer track records

Delivered, cancelled and on-time counts per developer from the registered project pipeline, grouped by corporate brand.

Pulse

The live table of every rated community with its registered trend, sortable; the deterministic registry answers are its sorted views.

The desk

Ridge's institutional contact point for licences, reports, corrections and appeals: /contact.