Damac Islands Phase 1 and 2

Damac Islands is a district rather than a project. The masterplan covers roughly 30 million sq ft in Al Yelayiss 1, on the Dubailand side of Emirates Road, and is planned for close to 5,900 homes across clusters named after tropical islands. Phases 1 and 2 cover the first of those. What is being sold is not a plot with a house on it but a manufactured environment, and that is the right way to read it.

Sold out in a day, then opened again

Phase 1 released in December 2024 and cleared inside 24 hours, taking around AED 10.2 billion in reservations. Damac followed with Phase 2 in November 2025, adding a further set of clusters. Absorption at that speed is worth reading carefully. It reflects real appetite for the format and the price point, and it also means the early clusters passed through a round of buyers before a wall was built.

The volume product is the townhouse. 4-bedroom homes start at about 2,319 sq ft and 5-bedroom layouts at roughly 3,323 sq ft, with 6 and 7-bedroom villas running considerably larger above them. On the 2026 price list the entry clusters open in the region of AED 2.3M to 2.5M for a 4-bedroom townhouse. That is where the community’s appeal sits for most buyers: a family-sized home with a private garden at a figure that would not stretch to a large apartment in the central waterfront districts.

Damac has built this format before, and you can go and look at it

The amenity list is the product here. An aqua dome, a wildlife park, a jungle river, hot spring pools, kayaking and zipline courses. On a masterplan drawing all of that is a rendering. The useful thing about Damac is that it has run this playbook twice already, and both results are standing.

DAMAC Hills 2 has been occupied for years, and DAMAC Lagoons has begun handing over, with the first residents moving into its Santorini cluster. Anyone weighing Damac Islands can drive to a finished version of the same idea and check the parts that matter: which amenities actually opened, how long after the first handovers they arrived, how the landscaping looks once it has been through a few Dubai summers, and how the place feels when it is lived in rather than launched. No brochure comparison is worth as much as that afternoon.

Inland, and 5,900 homes deep

Two things belong in the price. The first is the location. This is inland Dubai. Global Village sits about 4 km north and Emirates Road carries the traffic, but the coast is a long drive and Downtown and Dubai International are further still. Nothing here is walkable to anything outside the community, which is normal for this belt of the city and has to be accepted rather than argued away.

The second is scale. Close to 5,900 homes delivering from late 2028 into 2030 is a great deal of similar stock arriving inside one masterplan over a short window, and it lands on rents and resale prices at the same time. A heavily amenitised community also carries the running cost of those amenities in its service charge, a recurring figure that belongs in a yield calculation from the start rather than as an afterthought. The payment structure of 20% at booking, 55% across construction and 25% at handover puts three quarters of the price in before keys, so exposure runs the length of the build. Gorilla Real Estate Dubai can pull the cluster-by-cluster price list and the current service charge schedule, the two figures that decide whether this works as an investment or only as a home.