Arabian Hills Estate

Arabian Hills Estate is a freehold land project by Deca Properties at Al Faqa, in Abu Dhabi’s eastern desert along the Dubai–Al Ain Road. What is sold here is the plot, not the house. That is a rare product in this market: almost all off-plan supply in the UAE arrives as a finished unit, and freehold land a foreign buyer can develop themselves exists in only a handful of places. The masterplan covers around 244 million sq ft across fourteen phases, which puts it closer in scale to a small town than to a gated compound.

Four plot tiers

Land is sold in four size bands:

• Villa plots, roughly 12,000 to 20,000 sq ft
• Mansion plots, 20,000 to 50,000 sq ft
• Mega mansion plots, 50,000 to 76,000 sq ft
• Estate plots, 76,000 to 132,000 sq ft

For context, a villa plot in an established Dubai community rarely passes 6,000 sq ft, so even the entry tier here is several times the usual footprint. Space is what the desert location buys. The same money spent closer to either city would not cover a fraction of this area.

A lagoon masterplan built around horses

The community is planned around swimmable lagoons and a beach, with pools, an aqua park, a Zen garden, nature trails, playing fields and picnic grounds running through the landscaped zones. The anchor is a polo and equestrian club, and that is a deliberate fit rather than a luxury flourish: horses need land and quiet, and Al Faqa has both in a way no coastal site in the UAE can offer. Delivery is staged across phases rather than all at once, under a development budget of around AED 22 billion.

What buying land actually involves

Two things separate this from an ordinary off-plan purchase. The first is cost. The plot price is not the house price, and construction sits with the buyer as a separate budget on a separate timeline, which is why plot buyers need a longer horizon and more liquidity than apartment buyers. The second is control. Very little else at this level lets a buyer set their own footprint, orientation and architecture instead of picking from a developer’s three floor plans. Payment is structured with a booking deposit, instalments through development and a substantial share falling due after handover, which eases the cash requirement while a house is being built. The current schedule and plot availability are in the panel above. Gorilla Real Estate can talk through what a realistic build budget looks like on each tier before you commit to a plot size, which is the part most first-time land buyers underestimate.