A building that already exists
The Opus stands in Business Bay, inside the ring of towers around the Burj Khalifa. From the street it reads as one mirrored glass cube, and the architecture is subtractive: a curvilinear void cut through the middle of the block, with an atrium whose section changes floor to floor. It is the only Zaha Hadid building in Dubai that is finished and occupied, and the only one here where her studio signed both the envelope and the interiors.
That is not an aesthetic footnote. Authorship cannot be added later by renovation and cannot be reproduced across the road. OMNIYAT built 96 residences inside this cube; the number will not grow.
What is actually included
Residences are delivered furnished to Zaha Hadid Design specification. That removes the budget most buyers discover only after signing — the fit-out. No design procurement, no contractor, no gap between the title deed and the first night in the apartment. It also fixes the interior: a buyer who plans to strip the furniture out is paying for what they will discard.
The ME Dubai hotel operates inside the same building. For an owner who uses the residence a few months a year that changes ownership day to day: staffed reception, restaurants, somewhere to put visiting guests inside the perimeter. Two things to establish with the developer, not assume: which hotel services extend to residents and on what terms, and how the service charge is calculated in a mixed hotel-and-residential building. Hotel-grade common areas cost hotel-grade money to maintain.
Business Bay is a freehold zone next to the Downtown cluster — a working district, not a resort address, so the building is lived in all year. Availability is on the Opus tower page.
The 17 priced lots, read as a price list
Our catalogue holds 217 units across 13 OMNIYAT towers; 28 carry a published price and 17 of those are in The Opus, so most of the portfolio's transparent pricing sits here. Dollar equivalents use the dirham's peg of 3.6725.
- One-bedroom, from 82 m², AED 4,170,671 to 5,625,200 (≈US$1.14m–1.53m) — the 82 m² lot works out at AED 50,862 per m²
- Two-bedroom, 206 m², AED 10,872,463 (≈US$2.96m) — AED 52,779 per m²
- 245 m², AED 12,507,459 (≈US$3.41m) — AED 51,051 per m²
- Penthouse R-PH, 1,188 m², AED 150,000,000 (≈US$40.8m) — AED 126,263 per m²
Two readings follow. First, the standard residences sit in a narrow band — AED 50,862 to 52,779 per m², roughly AED 4,725–4,900 per sq ft — and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest rate among them is under 4%. This is a price list built on a rate per square metre, not on floor-by-floor view premiums; you negotiate inside that rate, not against it.
Second, the penthouse runs on different logic. At AED 126,263 per m², R-PH asks about 2.4 times the standard rate, and its AED 150,000,000 is the ceiling of our whole catalogue. Its comparables are not the floors below it but the trophy market — that segment sits on our Dubai penthouses page.
For an outside benchmark: Knight Frank's review of 2025 counted 205,400 residential transactions worth AED 544.2bn, put Dubai prime above AED 4,300 per sq ft at year-end and forecasts about +3% for prime in 2026. The standard Opus lots ask roughly 10–14% above that prime average — an asking price, not a valuation.
Completed and off-plan are different products
The Opus plan is 10% on booking, 90% within 14 days — a settlement schedule, not a construction schedule. Compare ORLA on Palm Jumeirah in the same portfolio: 5% booking, 20% on contract, 10% at six months, 15% at twelve, 50% on handover; or The Alba Resort Residences at 5/20/10/10/15/40. Off-plan spreads capital over years; The Opus wants nearly all of it in two weeks. If you are financing, get bank approval before booking and budget mortgage registration at 0.25% of the loan.
What that concentration buys is the removal of a whole risk category. Off-plan buyers are protected by real statute: Law No. 8 of 2007 obliges a developer selling off-plan to open an escrow account, Article 9(1) bars attachment of those funds by the developer's creditors, Article 14 holds back 5% of each account until a year after the units are registered to buyers, and Law No. 13 of 2008 voids any off-plan disposal not entered in the Interim Property Register (Oqood). Strong protection — but it protects your money, not your timeline. Delivery date, final specification and the market at handover stay open.
With a completed building none of those are open. You register and receive a title deed, and under Article 7 of Law No. 7 of 2006 the register carries absolute evidentiary value against all parties, challengeable only through proven fraud or forgery. The apartment, the finish and the neighbours exist, and letting can begin now rather than after a 2028 handover.
Residency follows the same logic. ICP sets the property investor route at a 10-year permit, threshold AED 2,000,000, with the property "fully owned by the investor"; DLD quotes the same threshold, AED 9,884.75 in total for the main applicant and 7–10 working days. Official sources are not aligned — u.ae still shows "5 years (real estate investments)", and off-plan eligibility appears only in ICP's eight-step guide as reported by Gulf News. A completed, registered title removes that ambiguity, and even the cheapest lot above is more than twice the AED 2m threshold.
The transaction budget
Registration is 4% of contract value. Executive Council Resolution No. 30 of 2013 shares it equally between seller and purchaser, and the DLD service page spells out 2% / 2%; in practice the buyer absorbs all four — custom rather than law, and negotiable. Add the trustee office fee of AED 4,000 + VAT for prices from AED 500,000, title deed AED 250, Dubai Municipality card AED 225, Villas and Apartments map AED 250, knowledge and innovation fees at AED 10 each.
Property Finder puts total buyer costs at 7–10% above price and notes that banks do not finance them — much of that being the customary 2% agency commission plus VAT. We work directly with the developer and take no commission from the buyer, so that line is absent from your budget.
On taxes: residential supplies are generally VAT-exempt, the first supply within three years of completion is zero-rated, and commercial property carries 5% — relevant for LUMENA or ENARA office floors, not for a home. Dubai Municipality charges a housing fee of 5% of annual rental value through the DEWA bill in twelve instalments. The Ministry of Finance tax list contains VAT, corporate tax and the domestic top-up tax; no annual property tax and no capital gains tax for individuals appear on it, and Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023 confirms that a natural person's real estate investment income is not business turnover.
Against the off-plan alternatives
Run the same arithmetic across our other priced lots. AVA at Palm Jumeirah — 17 residences in the tower, one per floor, 4 m ceilings, a private pool each, delivery 2026 — has two priced lots of 7,204 sq ft (669 m²) at AED 75,000,000 and AED 78,000,000: AED 112,000–116,500 per m². The 715 m² duplex at The Lana Residences, above the first Dorchester Collection hotel in the Middle East, is AED 85,000,000 — AED 118,900 per m². Both are more than double the Opus standard rate, and both are bought at or before handover. So the choice is not "Opus or Palm": a one- or two-bedroom here is the cheapest entry per square metre, among our priced lots, into a completed, hotel-served, architecturally singular address.
One caveat. Savills counted 910 completed branded schemes worldwide at end-2025, up 19% on 764, with Dubai first at 64 completed and 87 in the pipeline and an average premium near 33% over non-branded stock. But AGBI's August 2026 review of twelve branded projects under construction in Dubai found price per sq ft up in nine of them, by under 4% on average against +6.5% citywide in July, with individual resales below launch price, while Savills recorded off-plan launches down roughly 90% between Q1 and Q2 2026. The premium is real, and off-plan tests it hardest, because the buyer pays for a promise. A finished, occupied building with a signature that cannot be re-issued is a different position — an argument about risk, not a forecast of returns. More on our branded residences page. Prices from OMNIYAT lists, verified 27 August 2026.