What a Dubai facility management contract covers

A Dubai facility management contract is really two documents under one cover. One is a services agreement the two parties negotiate freely: scope, price, response times, penalties. The other is a set of duties fixed by law the moment a building sits inside a jointly owned property, whatever the contract itself says. The two rarely get separated on paper. They should be.

Everything else in the contract hangs off one working document that almost nobody outside the industry reads closely: the scope of services schedule. It turns facility management from a heading on a proposal into an asset register, a maintenance calendar, and a list of exclusions written asset by asset. Response times, KPIs and penalties only mean something once that schedule is fixed. Get the schedule wrong, and the rest of the contract argues about the wrong thing.

Hard services

Hard services are the plant that keeps a building alive: mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, HVAC and chiller plants, fire detection and suppression, lifts and escalators, standby generators, and the building management system tying the rest together. Each system is maintained to a planned preventive maintenance calendar built around the manufacturer's own service intervals. A chiller compressor and a fire panel do not share a maintenance calendar. A contract that treats them as one line item has not really been costed.

Soft services, and the one that needs its own licence

Soft services keep a building usable rather than merely functioning: cleaning and housekeeping, pest control, waste collection, landscaping and irrigation, and often a helpdesk or a concierge desk. Most of these sit inside the facility manager's own trade licence. Security guarding does not. Manned guarding in Dubai is regulated separately by the Security Industry Regulatory Agency, SIRA, which licenses the security industry independently of a facility manager's own registration. A tender that folds guarding into the headline price without naming the SIRA-licensed subcontractor behind it is hiding a gap, not offering a discount.

The scope of services schedule

The schedule is where the contract stops being marketing and starts being an obligation. A properly built one lists every asset by tag number, its location, its maintenance frequency, and what labour and materials the fee already covers, separate from what triggers an extra quotation. The British Standards Institution's BS EN 15221 series, a widely used reference for preparing facility management agreements, sets out this structure in its second part, and adds a seventh part specifically on performance benchmarking. Few Dubai contracts cite it by name. Most copy its logic anyway, because there is no serious alternative way to write one down.

Response and resolution times

Two clocks run on every fault log. A response time is how quickly someone acknowledges the ticket and turns up. A resolution time is how quickly the fault is actually fixed. The two are priced very differently. A blocked pantry sink and a failed fire pump cannot sit on the same timer, so contracts grade faults by severity, usually running from a life-safety or total-loss-of-power category down to a cosmetic one. No single Dubai law fixes these numbers. They are negotiated site by site, which is exactly why they need to be read rather than assumed.

KPIs, penalties and what they are not

A KPI framework converts the schedule and the response matrix into a scorecard: the share of tickets answered inside the agreed response time, the share of planned maintenance completed on schedule, cleaning audit scores, and whether statutory certificates are current. Fall below the agreed threshold, and the usual consequence is a deduction from the monthly management fee, sometimes called a service credit. That is a private, contractual penalty between two commercial parties. It is not the same thing as a RERA penalty against the licence itself, which is a separate, regulatory consequence that exists whether or not the client ever asks for one. Conflating the two is a common and expensive mistake.

The management entity's own licence, and Mollak

Where a building sits inside a jointly owned property, the facility manager is not free-standing. Managing the common areas is a licensed activity in its own right, registered with the Real Estate Regulatory Agency, RERA, the Dubai Land Department's regulatory arm. As of September 2026, the Department lists administrative supervision services for owners' associations as its own licence category. The category carries an annual fee of AED 10,000. A related activity, leasing and managing third-party property, carries an annual fee of AED 15,000, and every category adds a AED 20 knowledge and innovation fee. A company managing third-party property also needs a AED 5 million bank guarantee on file. Both the company and its relevant staff must be registered with RERA before anyone practises, and staff carry individual registration cards.

That licence sits inside a wider system called Mollak. Under RERA Circular No. 2 of 2019, issued 25 December 2019 under Law No. 6 of 2019 on jointly owned property and Law No. 4 of 2019 establishing RERA, a management company must register its licence, its staff and every property it manages in Mollak, and open a dedicated, RERA-approved bank account for each property's service and usage fees. The annual service charge budget only becomes chargeable once an accredited audit office has certified it inside the same system. When Mollak went live, companies had until 15 March 2020 to load their first certified budgets.

What a standard contract leaves out

Some exclusions are commercial habit rather than law. Others come straight from the regulator. Either way, a facility management fee rarely covers all of the following.

• Capital works: replacing a chiller at end of life, re-waterproofing a roof, renewing a lift's control system. These are priced and approved separately as capital expenditure, not folded into the fee that covers routine parts and labour
• Damage caused by a tenant's own fit-out, or by a contractor working for someone else on site
• Manned security guarding, carried by a SIRA-licensed subcontractor rather than the main facility management licence
• Land shown on a building's site plan as a mosque, or reserved for future development. RERA's 2010 Direction for Jointly Owned Property Declarations excluded such areas from both the service charge calculation and Owners Association membership; that Direction stays in force wherever it does not conflict with the newer Law No. 6 of 2019, so a building's current Common Areas Site Plan is still the document to check, not an assumption

Before signing anything, ask for two documents rather than one: the priced scope of services schedule, and proof of the relevant RERA or SIRA registration behind whoever is actually doing the work. Ask for both. A contract missing either one is not finished yet.