The call that should never happen
Picture the moment a secondary-market deal closes at the DLD trustee office. The transfer registers. The buyer’s manager’s cheque clears. Everyone shakes hands. And then, in the car park or on a WhatsApp message an hour later, one agent asks the other’s brokerage when the commission split is coming through.
That question — asked after the money has moved — is the real problem. Not the delay that follows, not the awkward back-and-forth between brokerages, not the selective memory about whether the split was 50/50 or 60/40. The question itself signals that something in the process was left open when it should have been closed. Chasing your own money is not an occupational hazard of working in Dubai real estate. It is a symptom of a process that was never properly finished.
This article is about that process — where it breaks, why it breaks, and what it actually looks like when it works.
What “earning” commission actually means in Dubai
Before diagnosing the failure, it helps to be precise about what agents are entitled to and when.
RERA, the regulatory arm of the Dubai Land Department, does not fix commission rates by law. However, it plays a critical role in regulating how commission is handled — only RERA-licensed brokers and agents can legally earn commission in Dubai. The rates agents work to — 2% of the agreed sale price for a secondary market purchase, plus 5% VAT on that commission — are market custom, not statute, and they are enforced through contract, not regulation.
That distinction matters in a dispute. RERA expects all commission arrangements to be documented in Form A or Form B. If a commission dispute arises, RERA’s processes handle the case — and having a written agreement is essential to win any dispute. The paperwork is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the instrument that converts the work an agent has done into a legally recognisable claim.
Verbal agreements are extremely difficult to enforce in Dubai. This is not a new observation. Every experienced agent has heard it. And yet deals still progress for days or weeks on the strength of a WhatsApp exchange that reads “yep, 50/50, let’s go.” That message will not help in front of RERA.
The secondary market deal and where the money sits
In a standard secondary market transaction — one where two separate brokerages bring buyer and seller together — the money flows like this: the buyer pays commission to the buyer’s brokerage, and the seller pays commission to the listing brokerage. When two agents are involved — a listing agent representing the seller and a buyer’s agent representing the buyer — the commission needs to be split between them. The most common structure in Dubai is a co-brokerage arrangement: the buyer pays 2% commission to their agent, the seller pays 2% commission to their agent, each side pays their own agent directly. That is the cleanest structure and the one that creates the clearest incentive alignment — each agent is financially accountable to the party they are representing.
The problem is that clean structure is not always how it plays out. Listings in Dubai frequently circulate without exclusive mandates. The same unit can appear on half a dozen portals, marketed by multiple agencies simultaneously. Whoever brings the buyer to a listing held by a different brokerage then has to negotiate not just the deal itself but the commission split with another agent. There is no official law dictating the exact split for agent-to-agent commissions, which means the terms of every co-broke deal are a private negotiation between two parties who may have sharply different expectations about what is fair.
Most Dubai brokerages use a 70/30 split when one agent supplies the buyer and another lists the property — the referring agent receiving 30% of the total commission. Others operate on a 50/50 basis. Exclusive listings sometimes see the listing agent offer a smaller split, such as 60/40, if they have exclusive rights. None of these ratios is mandated. All of them have to be agreed and documented before the deal closes — and this is precisely where most commission friction begins.
Form I: the agreement that agents skip at their peril
RERA provides a specific instrument for agent-to-agent commission agreements in the secondary market. When an agent comes across a listing managed by another broker, the two agents can sign a Form I — a broker-to-broker agreement that outlines how they will split responsibilities and commission. It is important to ensure the form reflects everything discussed — property type, location, and price range — so that expectations are aligned from day one.
In the case of any collaboration between agents, Form I clearly outlines the split of commission. This happens often in the case of secondary market properties where there are buyers’ and sellers’ agents. The purpose of Form I is to safeguard the rights of the agent, their listings, and their clients.
In Dubai’s cooperative brokerage ecosystem, multiple agencies often work together. Form I confirms which agent introduced the buyer and how commissions will be shared. The form captures what each party brought to the deal and what they are therefore owed when it closes.
The moment agents skip Form I — or treat it as something to sort out “after we see if this goes anywhere” — they create the conditions for every dispute that follows. If the deal falls through, there is nothing to argue about. If the deal closes, there is everything to argue about. Without the signed form, the buying agent’s claim that they were promised 50% is worth exactly as much as the listing agency’s counter-claim that the arrangement was 40%. Both positions exist in a vacuum of documentation.
Relying on verbal agreements, not discussing commission split until late in the process, assuming a 50/50 split without confirmation, and working with agents who refuse to sign Form I are the leading causes of commission loss in co-broke deals.
Form F: what the MOU does — and doesn’t — do for commission
Form F is the official Memorandum of Understanding issued by the Dubai Land Department for the sale and purchase of property in Dubai. It is not a preliminary agreement, a letter of intent, or a negotiating instrument — it is the executed sale contract. Once signed by both parties and accompanied by the agreed deposit, Form F creates legally enforceable obligations on the buyer to complete the purchase and on the seller to transfer the property.
The Dubai Land Department Form F covers property and financial details and the commission to be paid to the seller’s and buyer’s agents. That commission detail on the form is important — it puts the client on record acknowledging what their agent is owed. But Form F documents the agent-client commission relationship. It does not, by itself, document the split between two brokerages. A Form F that correctly records 2% commission to the buyer’s agency and 2% to the listing agency tells you nothing about the 70/30 or 50/50 that the two agents verbally agreed to three weeks earlier.
This is the gap. Form F protects both agents from the client. Form I protects each agent from the other brokerage. Both need to exist, signed, before any money moves.
If a deal falls through after MOU signing, some agents try to collect commission. Under standard RERA practice, commission is payable only upon successful transfer. That principle has a corollary: if commission only crystallises at transfer, then any split agreement left unsigned at that point is a split agreement that one party may choose to renegotiate — or ignore — precisely when the pressure is off and the money is in.
The VAT layer that agents mishandle
Since the introduction of VAT in the UAE in January 2018, a 5% Value Added Tax applies to real estate brokerage services. VAT is charged on the commission amount, not the property price. On a 2% commission for a secondary market deal, that 5% adds a meaningful line to the invoice, and the brokerage must be VAT-registered and provide a valid tax invoice. VAT applies to both sales and rental commissions.
In a co-broke deal, VAT handling becomes a point of friction that agents rarely think about in advance. The client pays the commission to the receiving brokerage — including VAT. That brokerage then has to pass the agreed split to the co-broking brokerage. The question of whether the split is calculated on the gross-with-VAT amount or the net-before-VAT amount is small in percentage terms, but it can represent a meaningful sum on a high-value transaction, and it becomes a dispute point when no one agreed it upfront.
The fix is straightforward: when documenting the split in Form I, specify whether the agreed percentage applies to the gross commission received (inclusive of VAT) or the net agency fee before VAT. This is one sentence. It prevents one argument.
The rental deal: commission at Ejari, then what?
Rental deals carry their own timing complexity. Commission is due when the Ejari-registered tenancy contract is signed and the security deposit and first cheque are handed over. In practical terms, this means the agent’s commission cheque lands on the same day the tenant hands over their rent cheques — the tenant hands cheques to the landlord or agent at signing, alongside the agency commission, and the contract is then registered on Ejari so the tenancy is official and services can be activated.
Agency commission on rentals is typically 5% of the annual rent, often with a minimum fee for lower-priced properties. For a rental deal involving two agencies — one that listed the property under a management agreement with the landlord, another that sourced the tenant — the split agreement has to be in place before that commission cheque is issued. Not after. Not when one brokerage’s accounts department gets around to processing a bank transfer.
The reason this matters in rentals specifically is the post-dated cheque structure. Rent in Dubai is still commonly paid by post-dated cheque, usually in one to four instalments. The agency commission, however, is typically collected as a single cheque at signing. That single cheque goes to one brokerage. If there is no signed agreement between agencies about how to divide it, the brokerage that holds the cheque controls the timing and amount of any onward payment — and their incentive to be generous is, charitably, limited.
Off-plan deals: a different problem with the same root cause
Off-plan commission works differently, and the risks for agents are different too.
When a developer sells units off-plan in Dubai, buyer payments go into a regulated project account. The Dubai Land Department and RERA require the use of escrow accounts for off-plan property transactions. These accounts ensure that buyer payments are securely held and released only in line with verified construction progress. This escrow mechanism — established under Law No. 8 of 2007 — is a buyer protection. The agent’s commission is a separate matter, paid by the developer directly, usually as a percentage of the sale price at or shortly after the SPA is signed.
For agents, the off-plan commission risk is not primarily about splits between brokerages — many developers publish standard co-broke rates and have their own registration systems for participating agents. The risk is different: it is about which agent gets credited with the introduction.
When a buyer views the same project through multiple agents — which happens constantly in a market with no exclusive mandates — the developer’s records of who registered the client first become determinative. Two agents can both sincerely believe they are owed the commission on the same buyer. One is wrong. The developer pays once and leaves the dispute to the agents to resolve without having provided either of them with a written agreement that covers that situation.
The preventive step — getting the developer’s written confirmation of the co-broke arrangement before investing further time in the client — is procedural, not legalistic. It is simply a matter of converting a verbal “yes, you’ll be paid” into something that can be referenced when the answer changes.
Why disputes survive due diligence
One of the harder things to accept about commission disputes in Dubai is that they survive good-faith effort. Agents who do their jobs well — who find the right buyer, qualify them properly, negotiate a clean deal, guide the MOU through — still end up chasing payment. That is genuinely unfair. But unfairness does not mean the outcome was unavoidable.
The structural reason commission disputes persist is that the Dubai market, by design, operates with low barriers to co-brokerage and no mandatory exclusivity. Any RERA-licensed agent with a valid BRN can bring a buyer to any listing. Real estate brokerage in Dubai is a regulated activity — practising agents must be registered with RERA and hold a broker card with a broker registration number. The licensing standard is clear. But the collaboration terms between licensed parties are left to those parties to agree. The regulator sets the floor, not the ceiling.
This means the professionalism of the process — how clearly splits are agreed, how promptly they are signed, how payment is structured — is entirely within the control of the agents involved. RERA will adjudicate a dispute if it reaches that point. A complaint can be filed with RERA through the Dubai REST app or the DLD website, and RERA will review evidence including Form A, Form B, communication records, and viewing confirmations. But a process that ends in RERA adjudication has already cost both parties time, goodwill, and in many cases money — regardless of who wins.
The question worth asking is not “what are my rights if this goes wrong?” but “what would make this go right in the first place?”
Why payment always stalls at the same point
Commission delays in Dubai almost always cluster around one moment: the period between deal completion and the resolution of which brokerage owes what to whom. The client has paid. The money sits in one brokerage’s account. And the agent on the other side of the deal is now a creditor of that brokerage, waiting for a payment that the brokerage has every practical reason to delay.
This is not necessarily bad faith. It is the natural consequence of treating the split as something to finalise later. “Later” always arrives after the leverage has shifted. Before the deal closes, both parties have an incentive to cooperate. After it closes, the party holding the money has the upper hand. They know it. Often the waiting agent knows it too.
The split of time and effort is also genuinely difficult to assign after the fact. When two agents are involved in a transaction — a listing agent representing the seller and a buyer’s agent representing the buyer — the commission needs to be split between them. How that split works determines a lot about how each agent behaves during the deal. If the split was never formally agreed, both agents can construct a plausible narrative about who did what. The listing agent emphasises their market knowledge, their client relationship, their marketing spend. The buyer’s agent emphasises the viewings they arranged, the negotiations they managed, the financing they helped the buyer navigate. Both narratives are true. Neither resolves the dispute.
The principle that removes the friction
Everything described above — the unsigned Form I, the vague WhatsApp commission agreement, the split calculated after the money lands, the VAT ambiguity, the competing narratives about who did what — has a single preventive.
Agree the split in writing, signed by both brokerages, before the client pays.
Then structure the deal so that every party receives their agreed amount at the same moment the client’s money moves — not in sequence, not on trust, not after a wire transfer that someone will get to next week.
This sounds obvious. In practice, it requires discipline at exactly the moment agents feel least inclined to slow down: when a deal is live, moving quickly, and the client is ready. Stopping to formalise the split feels like friction. It is not. It is the removal of friction — all the friction that would otherwise arrive later, when the deal is done and no one is in a hurry anymore.
Every split should be spelled out in writing to avoid disputes. That is not a compliance position. It is a cash-flow position. It is the difference between money that arrives the day a deal closes and money you spend the next three weeks asking someone to transfer.
The agent who builds this into every shared deal — who makes Form I non-negotiable, who specifies VAT treatment, who establishes payment timing before the MOU is signed — is not being difficult. They are being paid.
Structural discipline, not individual luck
The agents who rarely chase their own money are not the ones who pick better co-broke partners or get lucky with more cooperative brokerages. They are the ones who have made the upfront agreement a condition of their participation, not a courtesy to be arranged later.
This is a process standard, and it can be applied to every deal. Secondary market co-broke with a known agency: Form I signed before the viewing is confirmed. Rental deal involving a referring agent: split percentage agreed in writing, VAT treatment explicit, payment date tied to Ejari registration. Off-plan co-broke: developer confirmation of the registered agent of record, in writing, before showing the project to the client.
None of this is heroic. None of it requires a regulator to intervene. It requires treating the commission agreement as part of the deal — not an afterthought to it.
In a dual-agency dispute, the paper trail determines the outcome. The same is true in every commission dispute. The agent with the signed agreement wins. The agent without one negotiates from weakness, waits, or loses. That is the whole story.
Chasing your own money is a process failure. The process can be fixed. It should be fixed before the next deal, not after the next dispute.
