Data & Methodology

How we build the dataset

Oman has no open transaction registry — there is no official feed a site like this can simply republish. So the figures here are our own dataset, built and maintained by us from three classes of input: aggregated public listing data, published market research, and government statistics. None of those are usable as-is; the work is in what we do to them.

• Normalisation. Inputs arrive in mixed units and conventions — OMR per sqm, OMR per sqft, whole-unit asking prices across inconsistent floor areas. We convert everything to a single price/sqft basis (÷10.7639 where the input is per-sqm) so two areas can actually be compared.
• Asking-to-achieved adjustment. Advertised prices in Oman sit systematically above what properties actually transact at. We apply a ~8% downward adjustment for that gap rather than publishing asking prices as if they were sale prices.
• Cross-checking. No area is published on a single input. We reconcile independent inputs against each other and investigate the disagreements before publishing a figure.
• Confidence flagging.Where an input rests on a thin sample, or where a yield is a city-wide proxy rather than an area-level measurement, we say so on the area page itself instead of burying it. Every area carries a dated sourcing note explaining how its numbers were derived — for our earliest areas that note is currently shared across a few similar areas rather than fully individualised; we're backfilling those with area-specific citations.

Coverage is deliberately uneven. Muscat is our deepest dataset. Salalah and Sohar are thinner, because the underlying evidence there is thinner and we would rather publish three areas we can stand behind than twelve we can't. We only publish an area once we have a real, dated basis for it — we do not pad coverage with estimates.

Because there is no official registry behind them, these figures are labeled Estimated everywhere they appear, never presented as official transaction records.

What's real vs. what's modeled

• Current price/sqft and estimated rental yield — real figures, derived by the process above and dated on every area page. Not invented, and not a guess.
• Off-plan share — a directional estimate, not area-verified. Oman doesn't publish a citable transaction-level off-plan/secondary split, so the per-area figure shown is a reasonable estimate based on each area's known profile (established/prime areas skew toward secondary/ready stock, newer mid-market areas skew off-plan), not a transaction-verified breakdown. Every area page says so explicitly.
• The price/sqft trend chart — an illustrative shape anchored to the real current price, not a verified month-by-month history. We don't hold a historical time series yet; building one requires structured ingestion we haven't shipped. Until then the chart is always labeled “illustrative trend,” never presented as verified history.

Freehold eligibility

Oman restricts foreign freehold property ownership to designated Integrated Tourism Complex (ITC) zones (Royal Decree 12/2006). An area is only marked freehold-eligible on this site once we have verified its ITC status against a dated legal or administrative record, which we keep on file — see the "Freehold-eligible only" filter on each city page. This is a legal fact we verify per area, not an inference from price or location, and it should still be confirmed with a licensed Omani legal advisor before any purchase.

Update cadence

Today, the figures on this site are a snapshot, refreshed on a review cycle rather than streamed live. We say so in the footer of every page for exactly this reason: don't treat a number here as current-to-the-minute.

We're building toward more frequent, structured ingestion so area pages can show genuinely fresher figures instead of a periodic snapshot. Until that ships, every figure carries its own date so you can judge its freshness yourself.

How admin-entered areas are labeled

Areas can also be added directly through our internal admin tool with a manually entered, dated basis on file — these are labeled Manual admin entry rather than official registry or estimated-from-listings, so you can tell the difference at a glance.

Development project pages

Details on individual projects (developer, status, pricing, unit mix, completion timelines) are compiled from public reporting and developer announcements, cross-checked where possible — not a live developer feed. We keep the specific citation for each project on file internally rather than displaying it inline on every page, but you can request it through the contact form on the About page. Always verify current availability, pricing, and delivery dates directly with the developer before making any decisions.

Embed our data

Any tracked area's price/sqft and rental yield card can be embedded on another site as a small, self-contained widget — useful for a developer, agency, or news site that wants to show a live-looking snapshot with attribution back to the dated figures here, instead of copying a number out of context. Point an iframe at https://omanpropertyindex.com/embed/oman/muscat/[area-slug], for example:

<iframe
  src="https://omanpropertyindex.com/embed/oman/muscat/qurum"
  width="360" height="180" style="border:0" loading="lazy"
></iframe>

The widget always links back to the full, dated area page here — we don't offer an embed without attribution, since the whole point of this site is a number you can trace back to a stated method, not a number on its own.

Corrections

If you spot a figure that looks wrong or out of date, tell us — reach out through the contact form on the About page. We'd rather fix a mistake than have it sit there.