The deal that ends the relationship before the transfer even happens
Picture the scenario. A listing agent from one agency and a buyer’s agent from another have been working a mid-market apartment in Business Bay — no exclusive mandate, the property shared across portals, both sides communicating mostly by WhatsApp. The buyer wants to move fast. They sign Form F, the Memorandum of Understanding, and the buyer’s agent is holding the 10% security cheque. Commission is nominally 2% of the purchase price, split “as usual” — except nobody ever wrote down what “as usual” actually means between these two agencies on this specific deal.
The transfer date approaches. The seller’s agent is expecting 50% of the total commission. The buyer’s agent, who did three viewings, three rounds of negotiation, and handled the NOC paperwork, is expecting 60%. Both have told their respective clients the deal is clean. Neither has signed the Form I, the agent-to-agent agreement that governs the commission split and professional conduct between two collaborating brokers.
What happens next happens fast, and none of it is good for anyone’s reputation.
Why Dubai’s structure creates split disputes by design
Dubai’s secondary market has a specific and well-known structural feature: a property owner can register with up to three brokers at a time under Form A, one form per broker. There is no obligation to grant an exclusive mandate. The same property is legitimately on multiple portals, being shown by multiple agents from different agencies, and any one of them could produce the buyer who signs. This is not a loophole or a flaw — it is simply how most of the market operates.
The consequence is that co-broke arrangements — buyer’s agent from one agency, listing agent from another — are not an occasional edge case. They are the dominant structure for a large portion of secondary market transactions. When multiple agents are involved in a single listing, the commission is typically split among them, and this can sometimes complicate the transaction, so clear agreements should be in place from the start.
The complication is not philosophical. It is mechanical. The commission in a Dubai resale flows from the client — usually the buyer, who pays the 2% — to the brokerage, and the brokerage then pays out to the agents involved. When a deal closes, the total commission goes first to the brokerage, and the agent then receives their split — a percentage of that commission agreed upon at the start of their employment or partnership arrangement. In a co-broke, there are two brokerages in the chain, and the question of which one receives the gross amount and how it is then passed to the other is a question that has no automatic answer unless it has been written down in advance.
Commission agreements between agents — for instance, when a buyer’s agent and a seller’s agent split a fee on a co-broke deal — are governed by RERA Form I, which must be formally signed before any commission is disbursed. This prevents the informal arrangements that create disputes in less regulated markets and gives both parties a documented, enforceable position.
The key phrase there is “before any commission is disbursed.” Not before the listing goes live. Not before viewings. Before payment.
What Form I actually does — and what it does not do automatically
The Agent-to-Agent Contract, officially known as Form I, is a legally binding agreement used in Dubai to formalise the collaboration between two real estate agents. Form I is an agreement between two agents who act on behalf of the buyer and the seller. The form protects the agent’s rights, listings and clients. Form I also ensures a professional relationship between two or more agents and is mainly applicable when several agents are involved in one joint transaction concerning property sale or lease.
What Form I does: it creates an enforceable written record of who is owed what, before the money arrives. It specifies the exact split. It defines roles. It removes the ambiguity that makes post-deal arguments possible. The purpose of Form I is to safeguard the rights of the agent, their listings, and their clients.
What Form I does not do: it does not sign itself. It does not appear automatically because two agents shook hands or agreed by voice note. It requires both agents, from both agencies, to sit down — before the deal closes and ideally before the MOU is signed — and commit the split to paper. When two brokers collaborate, one representing the buyer and one the seller, Form I governs the commission split and professional conduct. Skipping Form I is the leading cause of commission disputes in Dubai.
In practice, Form I is skipped for the most human of reasons. Everyone is focused on the client. The viewing went well. The buyer is motivated. The seller is responsive. Momentum feels fragile and nobody wants to slow it down with paperwork between agents. The assumption is that everyone understands the split is “fair” — and “fair” will be sorted once the deal closes.
It will not be sorted. That assumption is where most disputes begin.
The window between Form F and transfer: where the damage happens
RERA Form F is a mandatory requirement for any real estate transaction to take place in Dubai, and it is often accompanied by a schedule, attachment, or incorporation by reference in the case of a separate sale and purchase agreement or a memorandum of understanding between the parties involved.
Agent commission — typically 2% of the sale price — becomes legally due upon Form F signing. This is the moment the client’s obligation to pay crystallises. But the actual transfer, and the actual disbursement of funds, happens later — through the DLD trustee office, after mortgage liability letters are obtained, after the developer’s NOC is issued, sometimes weeks after Form F is signed.
That window — Form F to transfer — is when agent-to-agent splits that were never written down become contested. One agent realises the other is expecting a different number. A WhatsApp thread gets forensically re-read. Phrases like “we usually do” and “I assumed” become weapons in a conversation that should never have been necessary. Meanwhile, the client — who has signed the MOU, committed 10% as a security deposit, and is now waiting for the keys — starts hearing that there is a “small issue” between the agents. Commission disputes are fact-specific — who introduced whom, what was signed, what was paid.
The client does not care whose fault it is. The client’s experience is that the people supposed to be managing the biggest financial transaction of their year cannot manage their own paperwork. That experience gets reported. In the family WhatsApp group, at the office, to the colleague who is planning to buy in Dubai next year.
What reputation actually means in this market
In Dubai’s increasingly competitive market, long-term success is often driven by repeat business, referrals, and reputation rather than purely transactional sales activity. Every working agent knows this at a theoretical level. The problem is that when a deal is live and moving fast, the theoretical dissolves and the transactional takes over. Get the deal done. Worry about the rest later.
But “the rest” is not abstract. Consider what actually happens to a client who has a clean, fast, well-managed experience buying or renting in Dubai.
They move in. Their colleagues ask how the process went. Their friend is relocating from London. Their employer has a new hire who needs an apartment. Their cousin from Abu Dhabi has decided to buy as an investment. In a city of Dubai’s demographic profile — internationally mobile, high-earner, deeply networked — a single satisfied client carries enormous referral value. Not because they are evangelists, but because their social and professional network is full of people in similar situations, making similar decisions, and the first question they ask is: do you know a good agent?
Clients who work with top real estate agents in Dubai report that the number one factor in their decision was referrals and word-of-mouth reputation, not advertising.
Now run the math in reverse. A client who has watched their agent fail to agree on a split with a counterpart, who saw a smooth deal turn rocky in the final two weeks, who arrived at the trustee office with a sense that something had nearly gone wrong — that client answers the same question differently. They do not refer. They warn.
One clean deal generates three referrals. One ugly deal — even one that technically closes — generates negative three. The math is real even if the precise number is not. The point is that reputation compounds in both directions.
The rental side is not simpler — it is just faster
Agents who focus on Ejari rentals sometimes assume the split problem belongs to the sales side. It does not. A co-broke rental — listing agent from one agency, tenant’s agent from another — has the same structural problem compressed into a shorter timeline. The total commission on a residential rental is conventionally 5% of the annual rent, paid at signing. For a residential lease in the secondary market, the tenant conventionally pays 5% of the annual rent as commission, plus 5% VAT on that amount, once at signing.
That commission is collected once, immediately, and must be split between two agencies before anyone moves on. There is no weeks-long window before transfer to sort things out. The Ejari registration that makes the tenancy contract legally binding happens around the same time. The urgency compresses the dispute into days rather than weeks, and the relationship damage happens faster.
For agents working in Dubai, understanding the Ejari system is essential. Ejari, which means “my rent” in Arabic, is a system that regulates all rental contracts in Dubai. It ensures that all rental agreements are fair and transparent, providing legal protection for both landlords and tenants. By being knowledgeable about Ejari, you can better assist your clients, enhancing your agent reputation and client satisfaction, which in turn can lead to more real estate referrals.
The same principle that applies to sales applies to rentals: the split must be agreed, in writing, before the client’s money is collected. Not after. Not “as soon as this is done.” Before.
The off-plan context: where commission timing gets complicated
Off-plan introduces a different but related wrinkle. The developer, not the buyer, pays the agent’s commission — typically paid at launch or at agreed milestones rather than at a single closing moment. Under the Dubai escrow law, developers must open a dedicated escrow account for each real estate project. All payments from buyers must be deposited into this account. The money can only be withdrawn in phases, based on actual construction progress. Importantly, each project has a unique account, and every payment should go directly into it, never to a sales agent or third party.
This means that in an off-plan deal, the agent does not receive commission from the buyer’s cheque — the developer releases it separately, on the developer’s timeline, from a separate account governed by the developer’s internal processes and RERA’s regulatory framework. The agent who referred the client, and the agent who closed the deal at the launch event, need to have their split agreed before the developer’s commission is disbursed — because once it lands with one brokerage, extracting the other party’s share requires a dispute process that damages both sides.
The same principle. The same solution. The split, agreed, signed, before the money moves.
How VAT makes undocumented splits a compliance problem, not just a relationship problem
All commissions are subject to 5% Value Added Tax under UAE law. Agents registered for VAT — which is required once annual earnings exceed the UAE federal threshold — must add 5% VAT to the commission invoice. Agents must issue VAT-compliant invoices.
This matters in a co-broke context because the split between agencies is not just a calculation — it is a transaction between two registered entities, each of which has its own VAT obligations. An undocumented, informal split does not produce the invoices each side needs. It creates a gap in each agency’s records, and it creates the possibility that VAT has been charged to the client but not properly accounted for in the split.
This is not a theoretical risk. RERA’s licensing framework and the DLD’s oversight of brokerage activity mean that the paper trail of a commission payment — who received it, who disbursed it, who invoiced whom — has regulatory visibility. Commission must be agreed in a written contract — Form A, B, or I, depending on the deal. Informal arrangements between agencies that skip the form work and skip the invoices are not just dispute-prone. They are non-compliant, and non-compliance is its own reputational and licensing risk.
The referral chain and how disputes break it
Here is the mechanism that most agents understand emotionally but rarely map out explicitly.
A client refers a colleague. That colleague buys through the same agent. That colleague refers a family member buying an investment unit. A referring client’s employer — a multinational with a relocating executive — calls the agency directly. One clean client, handled well at every stage, produces not one subsequent deal but potentially four or five over a two-to-three-year period. The economics of this are obvious, but the emotional logic is just as important: building trust and maintaining strong client relationships can become one of the most valuable drivers of sustainable growth as a real estate agent.
The referral chain is not broken by bad advice or wrong pricing. It is most commonly broken by friction the client was never meant to see. A dispute over a split between agents, conducted by WhatsApp in the week before transfer, with the client inadvertently copied on messages intended for the other party, is exactly this kind of friction. The client sees two professionals who cannot agree on something as basic as who gets paid what. They draw conclusions about how the rest of the process was managed.
Compliance is the foundation, but it’s mostly invisible to clients until something goes wrong. Listing accuracy is visible every day. That’s where trust can be won or lost quickly. The same applies to the commission process. When it works cleanly, the client never thinks about it. When it breaks down, it is the only thing they remember.
The behaviours that prevent the problem
Agents who build referral-driven books of business in Dubai are not necessarily the most talented negotiators or the agents with the best listing access. They are consistently the agents who do unglamorous things well — and the most unglamorous of those things is sorting out the paperwork between parties before the deal closes, not after.
In practical terms, this means:
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Raise the split question at first contact between agents, not at transfer. When a co-broke opportunity begins — when an agent from another agency calls about a shared listing — the commission split is part of that first conversation. Not aggressive, not adversarial, just: “Before we go further, let’s agree on the split and get the Form I done.”
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Never treat Form I as a courtesy. Always use Form I, even for referrals. Ensure the contract includes clear commission terms. The agent who suggests skipping it to keep things “simple” is creating a problem for both parties, not solving one.
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Document the agreed split before the MOU, not after. Do not wait until the deal is about to close. Discuss the commission at the start of the collaboration. The Form F MOU records commission amounts; those numbers should already match what both agents have agreed and signed in Form I.
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Treat the other agency professionally throughout. The agency on the other side of a co-broke is not a threat. They have a client you need, or a listing you need. The relationship with that agency is a professional asset that, if maintained well, generates future deal flow. The agent who respects the split, pays promptly, and keeps the other side informed builds a reputation in the agent community that produces inbound co-broke requests.
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Ensure both sides are paid at the same moment. The cleanest version of a co-broke is one where neither agency is waiting on the other to pass funds. The split is agreed in advance, both sides know exactly what they will receive, and payment moves simultaneously when the client’s commission is collected. Waiting — where one brokerage receives the gross amount and is expected to pass the other’s share later — is where delays compound into disputes.
The principle that closes the loop
There is a version of every Dubai deal — sales or rental, resale or off-plan referral — where both agents walk away paid, on time, without a single uncomfortable message to the other party. The client sees nothing except two professionals who handled everything smoothly. The client’s only experience of the commission process is signing one invoice, receiving one VAT-compliant receipt, and moving into their property.
That version is not aspirational. It is achievable on every deal. It requires exactly one discipline: commissions can be negotiated, but always agree in writing. Agree the split. Sign the Form I. Confirm the payment timing. Do all of that before the client’s money is anywhere near the transaction.
Any commission arrangement must be agreed in writing on a RERA-approved form before services are rendered. If no written agreement exists and a dispute arises, the DLD arbitration system will default to the standard rate — which may or may not reflect what either agent actually earned or agreed to, and the process of getting there will cost both parties time, money, and the one thing neither can afford to lose: the reputation they carry into the next deal.
The reputation math in Dubai is not complicated. One deal handled cleanly, with every party paid at once and every split agreed before the money moved, produces a client who refers without being asked. One deal that drips into dispute — even a dispute that ultimately resolves — produces a client who answers the question “do you know a good agent?” with silence or a warning.
The agents who build durable books of business in this market are the ones who understand that the agreement between agents is not an administrative afterthought. It is the foundation on which the client’s experience is built. Get that agreement right — in writing, up front, before the cheque — and the referrals follow as a matter of course. Leave it to goodwill and assumption, and the math runs the other way.
