Off-plan villas in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi

No house launches are on offer on Yas Island at present, although houses themselves are hardly absent. Those streets were built and sold during earlier phases of the master plan, and they trade today as resales rather than as new releases, which is why the current list is entirely vertical.

Villas here are therefore a second-hand purchase rather than an off-plan one.

A townhouse comes on the same terms: through the resale market, not through a launch.

The land still open for development is the waterfront strip, and along a shoreline that short a tower houses many more households than a row of homes would. That arithmetic settled the use of the remaining plots long before any buyer expressed a preference.

For a family the routes on Yas are a resale house in one of the established communities or a larger apartment near the beach. The second costs less, and on an island where the schools, the mall and the parks are minutes from the front door, the missing garden weighs less than it would inland.