Short answer. Property portals in the UAE publish no prices. A broker knows the monthly invoice total and does not know the cost per closed deal, because getting that number means tying spend to the source of each deal, and almost nobody does it. The calculation takes an evening and the answer is usually unpleasant. The rest of the wasted spend has nothing to do with the price of a lead. It happens in the first hour after one arrives.
The invoice from the Property Finder and Bayut portals arrives every month. The cost per deal never arrives at all.
What does a lead actually cost?
No portal publishes a price.
Property Finder, Bayut and Dubizzle all run on credits. A package is negotiated for each individual agency and depends on listing count, area, property type and placement level. None of the three sites carries a price list. That is ordinary commercial practice and there is nothing dishonest about it, but the consequence is simple: you cannot compare two offers based on published numbers, because published numbers do not exist.
What is known comes from brokers themselves. Market reviews through 2026 put a starter package of twenty to thirty listings at roughly AED 2,000 to 5,000 a month per portal, and a large package of two hundred listings or more at AED 15,000 to 30,000. Featured placement boosts and analytics access are billed separately. An agency on both Property Finder and Bayut usually budgets somewhere between AED 6,000 and 25,000 a month.
Those are planning estimates. None of them is a formal quote, your figure will differ, and only the portal can tell you what it is.
One feature of the model gets less airtime in the pitch. A buyer who enquires about your listing also enquires about competing listings of the same type in the same area, and that enquiry reaches several brokers at once. You are paying for access to a contact. Exclusivity is not included in that price.
Which number here is the honest one?
Cost per closed deal. Divide the year's portal spend by the number of deals where the portal was the first touch.
The formula is simple. All the difficulty lies in attribution.
| What you take | Where from | The usual mistake |
|---|---|---|
| A year of subscriptions | invoices, not memory | counting one portal out of two |
| Boosts and analytics | the same invoices | treating them as small change |
| Deals from the portal | CRM, by first touch | logging a returning client as a new lead |
| Commission on those deals | closed deals only | comparing spend against gross commission |
First touch here literally means first. A client who came through a referral a year ago and messaged through a listing this year is not a portal lead. That row is where the calculation most often skews in a flattering direction.
An industry review in 2026 put the cost of a portal-sourced deal at between AED 8,000 and 25,000 across the agencies surveyed. On a deal paying AED 40,000 in gross commission, that is 20 to 62.5 percent of the commission, and the agent has been paid nothing out of it yet.
Work the number out before you sign the next annual contract. Afterwards, the calculation turns into regret, because there is nothing left to change.
Where does a paid lead go?
Into the gap between the enquiry arriving and the first reply.
A number circulates in this industry that is worth correcting. Dubai trade blogs regularly write that replying within five minutes gives "21 times more conversions, according to Harvard Business Review". That sentence contains two errors at once.
First, the figure of 21 times refers to the odds of qualifying a lead, which means reaching a real conversation, and never to closing. Second, the source is not Harvard Business Review but James Oldroyd's study for InsideSales.com in 2007. The 2011 HBR study reports different figures: seven times and sixty times for the odds of qualifying, comparing an hour against two hours and against a day.
The mistake is common and made in good faith, and it has been repeated for years. It does not overturn the conclusion, because replying fast genuinely pays. It changes the promise. A fast reply opens a conversation. Closing the deal takes people and a property worth buying. We went through all four figures and what each one measured in [a separate piece](/insights/lead-response-time- evidence).
The practical consequence for a broker is simple. You pay the same amount for a lead whether you answer in a minute or in a day. Everything lost inside that gap comes out of money already spent.
What to fix first
Measure first, fix intake second, and only then touch the budget.
- Separate the sources in your CRM. One row per portal, one for referrals, one for your own site. The next step is impossible without it.
- Work out last year's cost per deal. Use the table above, honestly, boosts included. One number per portal.
- Measure time to first reply. Take the last thirty enquiries and see how long each waited for a real message. An autoresponder does not count.
- Cover nights and weekends. An enquiry that lands on Friday evening costs just as much by Monday and is worth less.
- Only now look at the budget. A portal with twice the cost per deal can still be the better one if it brings a different buyer. Closed deals decide this, and nothing else does.
Automation belongs in exactly two places here: the instant first reply, and qualification before an agent picks up the phone. Everything else in this work is done by people and there is no reason to replace them. We build that kind of intake for property agencies, and the first thing it produces is not a lift in conversion. It is an honest number that did not exist before.
The portal sells you access to a buyer. What happens to that buyer afterwards is not something a portal sells, or could sell. That part of the work is entirely yours, and it decides what a year of subscriptions was worth.
Danil Ivanov
Founder, KAIVIX
Builds AI systems for companies in the UAE and beyond.