Snagging is one of the few genuinely good deals in Dubai property. A surveyor spends half a day, lists two hundred defects, and the developer fixes them under the defects liability period. Worth every dirham.
But read a snagging report carefully and you will notice what it is not. It is a defects list: chipped tiles, doors that bind, a socket wired the wrong way round, a bathroom fall that runs away from the drain. Every item on it is something a contractor did wrong. None of it is about what the house will cost you in August, because nothing about the house being hot is a defect. It was designed that way, it was built to code, and it will be expensive for as long as you own it.
This is the inspection that runs alongside the snag list — the one that decides whether you are buying a 900 AED-a-month house or a 1,600 AED-a-month house wearing the same render.
Seven checks you can do yourself
1. Count the reflections in the glass
Hold a phone torch at an angle to a window after dark and count the reflected dots. Two means single glazing. Four means double. Dubai’s Green Building Regulations made double glazing mandatory for new work in 2011, and Al Sa’fat tightened it again from 2016 — but plenty of resale stock predates both, and villas are sometimes extended with cheaper glass than the original.
This is the single most informative thing on this page, because it sets the ceiling on every number that follows.
2. Measure the glass, do not eyeball it
Glass area is the variable that most people guess at and that most changes the answer. Our engine, run in survey mode — the conservative setting we are willing to contract against — on a 250 m² villa with a 1,150 AED monthly electricity bill and dual-reflective film on the glazing:
| Glazed area | Saving per year | Share of the electricity bill |
|---|---|---|
| 40 m² | 1,051 AED | 7.5% |
| 60 m² (typical) | 1,572 AED | 11.3% |
| 90 m² | 2,350 AED | 16.8% |
Two villas of the same floor area, one with a double-height glazed stair and one without, are not the same house. Walk with a tape measure, or at minimum count the panes and note which are floor-to-ceiling.
3. Look at the roof from inside
If there is a hatch to the roof void or a plant room at the top of the stairs, look at what is above the ceiling. You are checking for insulation board and whether it is continuous, wet, or simply missing over part of the slab.
It matters more than almost anything else on the list. Same villa, same bill, cool roof coating alone:
| Roof build-up | Coating saves per year | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Well insulated | 326 AED | Not worth buying for energy |
| Poorly insulated | 623 AED | Marginal |
| No usable insulation | 1,267 AED | One of the best buys in the house |
A factor of four, on a decision that looks identical from the street. Anyone who quotes you a roof saving without having been on your roof is quoting an average, and the average is wrong in both directions. The reasoning is on the cool roof page.
4. Find the air conditioning and read its plate
Note the manufacture year, the capacity, and whether it is a split system, ducted, or district cooling. A fifteen-year-old unit is not a defect and will not appear on a snag list, but it is a five-figure replacement on somebody’s watch, and the question is whether that somebody is you.
Also check the obvious things while you are there: filters, condensate drainage, and whether the outdoor units are sitting in full afternoon sun against a wall with no airflow. A unit that struggles because of where it was installed is a problem that adding capacity will not solve — see before you buy a bigger air conditioner.
5. The daylight test on every external door
Close each door to the outside and look along the edges in daylight. Any line of light is a gap, and in a Dubai summer a gap is conditioned air leaving and 45 °C air arriving. On the same 250 m² villa, sealing the external doors and the balcony blocks is worth 581 AED a year in survey mode, from about 1,550 AED of work. It is unglamorous, cheap, and consistently among the fastest paybacks we calculate.
6. Count the thermostats and the zones
One thermostat for five bedrooms means the whole first floor is cooled to whatever the hottest room needs. Zoned controls on the same villa are worth 871 AED a year. Note how many there are and whether any of them are programmable — a villa that has been run on a single dumb thermostat since handover has usually been overcooling three rooms out of five for years.
7. Ask for twelve months of DEWA history
On a resale, ask the seller. Any reasonable seller will share it, and a refusal is information too. What you want is the shape rather than the level: a summer three to four times the winter is normal villa behaviour, while a flat high line year-round means something is running that should not be. There is a fuller guide to reading it in what a normal DEWA bill looks like.
Two villas, same bill, same package
Here is the whole argument in one table. Same 250 m² floor plan, same 1,150 AED monthly electricity bill, same work done to both — film on the glazing, coating on the roof, door seals, zone thermostats — priced identically. Survey mode throughout.
| Villa | Fabric | Package saves per year | Share of bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Older stock | Single clear glass, no roof insulation | 3,863 AED | 27.7% |
| Newer stock | Double tinted glass, well insulated | 2,607 AED | 18.7% |
Roughly 1,250 AED a year of difference, every year, from two things you could have checked with a torch and a roof hatch. The older villa is the better retrofit and the worse house to live in untouched; the newer one is already doing most of the work and has less left to gain. Neither fact appears anywhere in a snagging report.
Three things that matter less than people expect
The point of an honest checklist is telling you where not to spend your attention.
- Orientation, at villa scale. Everyone asks which way the glass faces. With the same total glazed area, shifting the glass from mostly north and east to mostly south and west moves the film saving from 1,507 to 1,636 AED a year — under nine percent. Orientation decides which rooms are uncomfortable; area and glass type decide the bill. Check the area first.
- Facade condition, as an energy question. A transparent hydrophobic treatment does not change the colour of the wall, so it does not change how much heat the wall absorbs. We sell it for what it does — keeping salt, dust and water out of the render — and we do not put a savings figure on it. Details on the facade page.
- Pool deck surface temperature. Real, measurable, and worth doing if the deck is unusable at four in the afternoon. It is a comfort item, not a bill item, and we do not claim a DEWA saving for it. See why.
What to do with what you find
- On a resale, price it. A villa needing 25,000 AED of envelope work to reach the comfort of the one next door is worth less than the one next door, and this is a negotiable, evidenced number rather than an opinion about finishes.
- On a handover, sequence it. Envelope work is markedly easier in an empty house, and the order of operations is set out on our new villa checklist.
- Either way, establish the baseline before you buy anything. Two clean summer bills are what any savings guarantee — ours included — gets measured against.
- Do the cheap items first regardless. Seals and zone controls pay back faster than anything involving scaffolding, on almost every villa we survey.
The short version
Snagging protects you from the builder. This protects you from the design. Count the reflections in the glass, measure the glazed area, get your head into the roof void, read the plate on the air conditioner, look for daylight around the doors, count the thermostats, and ask for a year of bills. Seven checks, most of a morning, and they change the arithmetic of every quote you will be given afterwards by up to fifty percent.
When you know the glass and the roof, the numbers stop being ranges. The calculator will run your own figures without asking for contact details, every rate we charge is published on the pricing page, and the measure-by-measure ranking is on how to cut a DEWA bill. If you have just taken keys rather than made an offer, start with the first ninety days instead.