Building and community price pages: spec to rank

Two points changed after this spec was written. (1) The author is not decided; the test pages use a "data desk" byline. (2) The spec says building-name searches need many links. Propsearch ranks first for building names with about 2,400 linking domains, most of low quality, so full coverage and facts on each page matter more than links.

What we must beat

Bayut's building guide is long, well structured and backed by a strong domain, but it is slow, unsigned and its numbers are not in the HTML. Measured on Marina Gate 1 on 7 October 2026.

Domain strength, from DataForSEO backlink data:

Bayut's guide sections, in order: Highlights, In a nutshell, Building details (parking, elevators, security, gym, pets), Floor plans, Apartment types by bedroom, Recent rental transactions, Rental trends, Top agents for renting, Recent sale transactions, Sales trends, Top agents for buying, Rental yield, Transport, Restaurants, Supermarkets, Schools and nurseries, Nearby buildings, Landmarks, Things to consider, FAQs, Ratings and reviews.

Where we can reach number 1, and where we cannot yet

No page spec guarantees position 1. Rank on a building name is decided by relevance, page quality and domain strength together, and we start with no links. The plan is to win in this order.

Three rules follow from this table.

1. Publish first the buildings where the name gets searches and no portal guide exists or ranks.
2. Target the price modifiers in titles and headings: sold prices, price per sq ft, service charge, floor plans, rental yield.
3. Earn links with the data (see Links and distribution). Without links the head names stay with Bayut.

Building price page: structure

The first screen gives the price answer; each section after it answers one question a buyer, seller, family or investor asks. Sections 1 to 9 are the data core that the portals do not have. Sections 10 to 14 match what Bayut's guide covers, so we lose no topic.

URL: /dubai/{community}/{building}/. Title: {Building} Sold Prices, Price per Sq Ft & Rental Yield ({Month Year}) | {Brand}, 60 characters or fewer where the name allows. H1: {Building}, {Community}: sold prices and market data. Meta description: live numbers, for example "{Building}: {N} sales in 12 months, median AED {X} per sq ft, {Y}% gross yield. Sold prices by unit, floor and view. Updated {date}."

Page rules:

• Each H2 opens with one sentence that states the finding with its number and date. That sentence is what a search engine or an AI answer quotes.
• Every number has a date and a count behind it ("median of 64 sales, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026").
• A section with too little data is left out, not padded. Minimum: 5 sales for a median, 20 for a floor or view effect.
• A sticky in-page menu lists the sections. No pop-ups, no contact gate.
• Publish a building page only when it has 10 or more recorded sales, or when it is off-plan with a full unit register.

Building page: every table and data point

Each row is one data point on the page, with the feed that supplies it. Feed numbers are from the data plan.

Building page: FAQ set

Each answer is 40 to 60 words, starts with the number, and is built from the page's own data, so no two buildings share an answer. A question is shown only when its data exists. {B} is the building name.

Show 8 to 12 per page, chosen by the data that exists. Bayut shows 2 on its guide and 21 on its search pages; Property Finder marks its FAQ with Question and Answer schema.

Tools on the page

Each tool works without login and without a contact form; that is the difference from TruEstimate, which asks for a title deed and then name, email and phone.

Build the tables and the unit lookup first. The four calculators are also separate pages in the build plan; the building page embeds them with the building's numbers filled in.

Owner and resident reviews

Reviews are section 13a of the building page, "What owners and residents say", placed after service charges and before schools. Both rivals have a reviews block; ours must be verified and structured, because a new site starts with none.

The section has three parts:

1. Our verified reviews. An owner or tenant enters a unit number; we match it to a recorded sale or accept a tenancy document. They rate fixed items from 1 to 5: build quality, management, service charge value, noise, lifts, parking, chiller and utility costs, and add free text.
2. Themes from public sources. Three to five recurring points, written by us, each with a source link and date.
3. Rating elsewhere. The Google rating and review count, attributed, with a link.

Rules:

• Each review shows owner or tenant, years in the building, floor band and date. No names unless the reviewer chooses.
• The page states the number of reviews. With fewer than 5, no average is shown.
• AggregateRating and Review schema only on reviews we collect ourselves.
• Moderation policy and a right of reply for the building's management, both published.
• Ask for reviews where owners already are: the unit lookup, the price alert email, and the share link that brokers send.

Community price page

The community page is the building page one level up, plus the family and lifestyle topics that Bayut's area guide owns. Community names carry the largest demand (18,100 to 165,000 searches a month), and area guides are 21% of Bayut's top-page traffic in the UAE and 27.5% in the UK.

URL: /dubai/{community}/. Title: {Community} Property Prices, Rents & Sold Data ({Month Year}) | {Brand}. H1: {Community}: property prices, rents and market data.

Community FAQ set: average price per sq ft; price of a {n}-bedroom apartment or villa; are prices rising; cheapest and most expensive buildings; best buildings for yield; average rent by bedroom; is it freehold; which schools are in or near it; how far to Downtown, DIFC and the airport; is there a metro; how many off-plan projects and when they complete; service charge range; is it good for families (answered from schools, parks and commute numbers); is it a good investment (answered with yield, growth and supply, with the limits stated).

UK variant of the community page: same data, prices also in GBP, a short "buying from the UK" block (ownership, purchase costs, non-resident mortgage, golden visa threshold), and a link to the UK research pages.

E-E-A-T: author, reviewer, method, sources

Property prices are a money topic, so the page is judged on who wrote it and whether the numbers can be checked. Neither Bayut's guide nor Property Finder's building page names an author, a method or a guide date. This is the cheapest gap to close.

Author and reviewer

• Byline on every page: a named author, linked to an author page. The person is not decided.
• Author page: Dubai resident since 1976, what the data project is, how to contact, links to LinkedIn and to published work. State plainly that the author is an analyst, not a broker.
• Reviewer line: "Reviewed by {name}, RERA-registered broker, BRN {number}". We do not have this person yet. It is the main missing trust signal and needs your decision.
• Person schema for both, with sameAs links; author and reviewedBy on the page schema.

Experience (first-hand evidence)

• Original photographs of the building and of the views from each side, with the date taken.
• The key plan marked up by us: which side faces what.
• A short "what we found" note per building, written from the data: one unusual fact (for example the east side premium at Golf Views Seven City).
• For flagship buildings, a 2 to 4 minute video walk-round; YouTube is the second or third most cited source in AI answers on Dubai property.

Method and sources block (on every page, same wording)

• Where sold prices come from: Dubai Land Department records, with the licence (DLD open data is CC BY 4.0) and the data-to date.
• Where asking prices and rents come from, and the date of the snapshot.
• How each figure is calculated: median, period, minimum count, how off-plan and resale are split, how outliers are handled.
• What the page cannot tell you: for example no buyer nationality, no private sales outside the register.
• A check line: "Yearly sales counts match the DLD open dataset within 2%" (already proved for Golf Views Seven City).
• A link to the full method page and to the CSV.

Trust

• Visible dates: data to, page built, next update.
• Corrections log on the page: date, what changed, why. The first version of our Golf Views page read the unit code the wrong way round; say so.
• About page, contact page, editorial policy, privacy page, company name and licence in the footer.
• A statement of independence: no agent pays to appear; no lead is sold. If that changes, say so.
• "Not financial advice" line; no promises of returns.
• A way to report an error on each page.
• External citations to primary sources: DLD, RERA, KHDA, the developer's own project page.
• No AI-written filler. Every paragraph must hold a number, a source or an observation.

Technical SEO checklist

The portals are technically clean (titles, descriptions, one H1 and self-canonicals on nearly every page crawled) but heavy and slow. Speed and data in the HTML are where we can be better.

Rendering and speed

• All tables, FAQ text and the chart's data are in the server HTML. Bayut's guide tables are not.
• Static pages, built from the database; no client-side data fetch for content.
• Targets on mobile: Lighthouse performance 90 or more, LCP under 2.5 s, CLS under 0.1, page weight under 500 KB. The rivals score 26 and 33, with 5.8 to 7.0 MB.
• Chart as inline SVG or one small script loaded after the content; images in WebP or AVIF with width and height set, lazy-loaded below the first screen.
• No pop-ups or interstitials. Bayut opens a "TruBroker Stories" modal on its search page and an alert prompt on its transactions page.

On-page

• One H1; H2s as the section names above; H3s phrased as the question where natural.
• Title with the building name first, then the price words; unique per page; the month and year in it only if the page is rebuilt each month.
• Meta description with live numbers (Property Finder does this on its transactions pages).
• Self-referencing canonical; lowercase, hyphenated URLs; no query strings for content states.
• Breadcrumb: Dubai, community, sub-community, building.
• Descriptive alt text on every image; Open Graph and Twitter card tags with a generated chart image.
• lang="en"; hreflang only when a real second version exists (en-AE and en-GB for the UK variant; Arabic later).

Structured data (JSON-LD)

• BreadcrumbList.
• Article or WebPage with author, reviewedBy, datePublished, dateModified.
• ApartmentComplex or Residence for the building: name, address, geo, number of units, year built.
• Dataset for the sales table: description, temporal coverage, licence, download link, creator.
• FAQPage for the FAQ. As far as I know Google now shows FAQ rich results only for a few site types, so expect the benefit in AI answers, not in a richer search listing.
• Person for author and reviewer; Organization with logo and contact.
• Validate every template in Google's Rich Results Test before the batch build.

Architecture and internal links

• One location tree: /dubai/{community}/{building}/; later page families hang from the same path.
• Community page links to every building in it; each building links to its community, 5 to 8 nearby buildings, the same developer's other buildings, and the calculators.
• Bedroom anchors inside the page (#2-bedroom), not separate thin pages.
• HTML sitemap by community; XML sitemaps split by community with true lastmod.
• Hub pages: all communities, all developers, newest sales, biggest movers.

Crawl and index control

• Index only pages above the data minimum; others are not built.
• robots.txt allows search and AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) unless you decide otherwise.
• Search Console and Bing Webmaster verified on day one; submit sitemaps; use IndexNow for Bing.
• One domain. A custom domain, not vercel.app; the building pages are on a vercel.app address today.
• 301 redirects kept in a file when a building is renamed.

Freshness

• Monthly rebuild of every page with new sales; weekly for listings numbers.
• "What changed this month" line near the top of each page.

AI visibility checklist

AI answers on Dubai property cite a brokerage, YouTube and the Land Department ahead of the portals, and no data site at all in the UK. dxbinteract.com ranks first in Google for "dubai property prices" yet is cited in only 97 AI answers in the UAE, against about 10,000 each for Bayut and Property Finder: data inside an app is not quotable.

• Answer-first sentences. Each section opens with a complete sentence that holds the entity, the number, the unit and the date. Example with made-up figures: "The median sold price in Marina Gate 1 was AED 2,650 per sq ft in the 12 months to September 2026, from 64 sales."
• Facts in text and tables, not only in charts. A chart's values are repeated in an HTML table.
• Question headings that match how people ask, with a 40 to 60 word answer directly below.
• Stable, citable facts box near the top: developer, completion, floors, units, coordinates.
• Source and date beside each figure, so an answer engine can attribute it.
• A dataset to cite: a monthly "Dubai building price index" page and CSV with a fixed URL and licence.
• Consistent entity names: the official building name, common alternatives and the Arabic name on the page.
• Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt. An llms.txt file costs little; its effect is unproven.
• Be present where AI looks: a YouTube video per flagship building and community with the numbers in the description; answers on Reddit threads about the area, signed, with the source link; a Wikipedia-style facts page is not possible, so aim for citations in Khaleej Times and Gulf News, which AI answers also cite.
• UK: a page set written for UK questions (prices in GBP, buying from the UK, tax, visa), since Zoopla, Wise and the Guardian are cited there today.
• Measure: the weekly prompt panel, 40 prompts per market, counting which domains are cited. Baseline is in the portal audit.

Links and distribution

The page quality gets us the price-intent searches; links decide the head names. Bayut has 18,692 referring domains and dxbinteract.com ranks for "dubai property prices" with 1,261, so a data site can rank with far fewer links than a portal if the links are relevant.

• Monthly data release. One finding with a chart: biggest movers, asking-to-sold gap by community, floor and view premiums. Send to property reporters at Khaleej Times, Gulf News, The National and Arabian Business, and to UK property desks for the UK angle.
• Embeddable chart or badge for brokers and bloggers: "{Building} price trend, source {Brand}", with a link back.
• Free CSV and a method page that analysts and students cite.
• Broker partners. Give agents a share link to a unit's history for their listings. The reviewer's brokerage links to the pages it reviews.
• Developer and owners' association pages for flagship buildings: offer the building page as the reference.
• Reddit and forums. Reddit threads (r/dubai) rank for family and lifestyle questions; answer with data and the source link, under your own name.
• YouTube. Short building and community videos; link in the description.
• Our own network: our sites, LinkedIn articles with one chart each, the client and agent contacts you already have.
• Digital PR hooks from findings we already hold: the golf-side premium, the 15% asking-to-sold gap for studios, 19 months of supply at Golf Views Seven City.
• Do not buy links or use link networks; a new money-topic site is the easiest kind to penalise.

Rollout, measurement, risks

Rollout

1. Decide the portal-data question. Unit numbers and listings come from public portal pages; the DLD open data has no unit numbers. Without a yes, sections 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9 of the building page change or go.
2. Bind the custom domain and set up Search Console, Bing and analytics.
3. Finish the building template to this spec on Golf Views Seven City; validate schema; measure Lighthouse.
4. Publish a first batch of 25 buildings chosen by rule 1 (searched names with no ranking portal guide), plus their 5 to 8 community pages.
5. Add the method page, author page, about and contact pages, and the first monthly data release.
6. Review after 4 weeks: indexed pages, impressions by query type, positions for price-intent searches. Then scale to 250 buildings, then all buildings above the data minimum.
7. Add schools, drive times and service charges to the templates as those feeds arrive.

Measurement

These targets are my estimates, not forecasts from data.

Risks

• Source of the data. Publishing Property Finder-derived data may breach its terms. Not decided.
• Scaled thin pages. Thousands of templated pages with little data each can be treated as low-value content. The data minimum and the per-building "what we found" note are the controls.
• Accuracy. One wrong number on a price page costs trust. Keep the DLD cross-check and the corrections log.
• No reviewer. Without a licensed reviewer the E-E-A-T case rests on one analyst.
• Domain age. Head names will not move for months whatever the page quality.
• Portal response. Bayut already has the transaction data on its guides; it could put it in the HTML and add method notes quickly.

First test build: Clover Bay, Business Bay

Our first build scores 14 of 25 for E-E-A-T: above Bayut (10), Property Finder (8) and Dubizzle (3), and one point below Propsearch (15). Clover Bay is an office tower, not a residential one, so the page is built from Dubai Land Department open data only; we hold no Property Finder sales or listings for it.

Each item is scored 0 to 5 with the rubric used on the Golf Views Seven City page. The scores are my judgement, not a Google metric.

Why each rival scores as it does:

• Propsearch: "Updated 1 Feb 2026", a date and DLD transaction ID on each sale (latest 28 September 2026), own photographs, architect and project value. Only 10 of 50 sales are visible without sign-up. No author.
• Bayut: full building facts and a service charge table citing DLD, but no author, no date in the HTML, no reviews, and "trends" that restate asking ranges. 1,105 words.
• Property Finder: no developer, year, floors, units or prices. It shows resident lifestyle scores and renter nationalities on an office building, and its transactions page for the building returns "0 sales".
• Dubizzle: 10 office adverts and no building content.

Why ours scores 14:

What the page found that no rival shows:

• Median AED 1,686 per sq ft in the 12 months to 12 February 2026 (33 sales), 26% above the year before.
• Over 24 months the median is 9% below ready offices in the rest of Business Bay; rank 13 of 21 projects.
• Two layouts, about 942 and about 1,208 sq ft, make up 88% of office sales.
• The land register supports completion in 2011 to 2012, not 2016: off-plan sales stop in January 2012 and ready sales start on 8 February 2012.
• The register files recent Clover Bay sales under the area "Burj Khalifa", not "Business Bay".

To reach 20 or more:

1. Fresh sales data: take the DLD files directly, not from the mirror that stops in February (Freshness 3 to 5).
2. One site visit with photographs and a dated note (first-hand 0 to 2).
3. A licensed reviewer and an author page (Author 3 to 5).
4. Asking prices and rents for offices, which our listings scrape does not collect today (Facts 4 to 5).

Build script: RealEstate/pages/generator/build_dld_office_page.py. Output: RealEstate/pages/preview/business-bay-clover-bay/. The page is a private preview and is not deployed.