Does Every Property Manager or Broker in Dubai Need Their Own RERA License?

A company's Trakheesi trade license does not cover the people who work for it. Here is the separate card every individual broker, consultant and property manager in Dubai must hold — and the free lookup that lets anyone check it in seconds.

Yes. A Dubai Land Department company license covers the business, not the individuals who work in it. Every person practicing a licensed real estate activity — brokerage, mediation, consultancy, valuation, registrar work or private real estate management — must separately hold a Real Estate Activity Practice Card, issued through the same Trakheesi system as the company license.

Dubai Land Department states the rule directly: "No person shall have the right to practice the activity registered in the license except after registering and obtaining the card designated for the type of activity." The company license is necessary but not sufficient.

What is the Real Estate Activity Practice Card?

It is an individual, activity-specific credential tied to a named person rather than a company. Dubai Land Department lists thirteen covered activities, including real estate broker, national broker, real estate projects marketing, mortgage broker, real estate registrar, private real estate management, real estate management, real estate consultant, mortgage consultant, private real estate sale and purchase, real estate services registrar, real estate evaluator and trainee evaluator.

The card's validity is tied to the validity of the holder's employer's trade license — so it lapses automatically if the company license does, and it does not carry over automatically if the person changes employer.

Who actually needs one, and what does it cost?

Anyone practicing one of the thirteen listed activities on their employer's behalf needs the matching card before they can legally act — this includes the property manager signing off on an owner statement or handling a tenancy renewal, not only the agent closing a sale.

• Most card types — AED 500. Broker, national broker, consultant, mortgage broker, mortgage consultant, private real estate management, real estate management, private sale and purchase, registrar, services registrar, and trainee evaluator cards all carry this fee, plus AED 10 knowledge fee and AED 10 innovation fee.
• Real estate evaluator card — AED 5,000. The highest tier, reflecting the additional experience requirements below.
• Broker exam — AED 700, plus AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation fees, plus an AED 50 + VAT ERES fee for brokers specifically.
• Service time — 5 minutes via Trakheesi once the exam and documents are in order. Payment by credit card, e-dirham or Noqodi.

Required documents are a personal photo, a copy of the Emirates ID, and — depending on activity — an experience certificate. Brokerage-type roles must also hold a Dubai Police certificate of good conduct and pass the annual profession exam.

Who is exempt from sitting the exam?

Three groups skip the test: applicants over 55 years old, brokers with five or more consecutive years at the same real estate office, and holders of a start-up license (rukhsat intilaqa). Evaluator and trainee-evaluator roles instead follow a separate experience path instead — two years of real estate valuation experience for UAE nationals, five years for expatriates, or one year training at a RERA-approved office for a trainee evaluator.

How is this different from the company's Trakheesi license?

The two licenses answer different questions, and a manager needs to be clean on both. The company license — covered in detail in who may legally manage property in Dubai — authorizes the business entity: a leasing and third-party management license costs AED 15,000 a year plus a AED 5 million bank guarantee, with a one-working-day Trakheesi processing time. The Practice Card authorizes the specific person inside that business to actually perform the activity.

A company can hold a spotless license while an individual staff member handling leases or statements has no card at all — and because the two registrations live in different places, that gap is easy to miss internally and almost invisible to an owner or tenant, which is exactly why the public verification step below matters.

How can an owner or tenant check this themselves?

Dubai Land Department publishes a free, public lookup of RERA-licensed brokers, searchable through the DLD website or the Dubai REST app, with an immediate result and no fee or residency restriction. It is built for brokers specifically, with a separate real estate companies listing under the Information section of the same portal for checking the business side.

Verification steps

1. Open the DLD website or Dubai REST app and find the "Licensed Real Estate Brokers" service under Information/eServices.
2. Search by the individual's name to confirm they appear on the RERA-licensed brokers list, which updates in real time and returns an immediate result.
3. Separately search the real estate companies listing to confirm the employer itself holds a current Trakheesi license — a valid personal card at an unlicensed or lapsed company is not a safe signal on its own.
4. Treat a "not found" result as a direct question, not a formality. Ask the individual or their employer for the card number and activity type before proceeding with a transaction or signing a management contract.

What happens when a company is licensed but staff aren't carded?

The exposure sits with the individual action, not the company's paperwork. A company's trade license does not retroactively authorize everything a staff member without a card has signed, listed or filed on its behalf — and because a card's validity is pegged to the employer's license, a change of employer or a lapsed company license can quietly invalidate what looked like a settled credential. For a property manager specifically, this is the same individual-licensing gap discussed in what should be in a Dubai owner statement: the Practice Card requirement sits directly behind who is entitled to sign one off.

At portfolio scale

A single agent can keep track of one card and one exam date. A property management company running leasing, renewals and owner statements across dozens of units and several staff members is tracking a card per person, each with its own exam and renewal cadence, each silently tied to whichever trade license that person's name sits under at the time.

That is a roster problem, not a one-off check: an HR or compliance function needs to know, at any moment, who currently holds a valid card for which activity, and whether anyone is actively signing leases, statements or listings without one.

How PropertyPad handles this

PropertyPad keeps individual licensing status attached to each staff record rather than assumed from the company's license alone, so a lapsed or missing Practice Card surfaces before that person signs off on a lease, renewal or owner statement — not after. See what PropertyPad does across leasing, licensing and owner reporting.