JLL Transparency Index 2026: Four Markets Read

What the Global Real Estate Transparency Index actually measures#

The Global Real Estate Transparency Index, published by JLL and LaSalle on 14 September 2026, is the reference instrument for scoring how much a real estate market discloses about itself. The fourteenth edition covers 88 countries and territories and 146 city markets, scored across 260 factors and sorted into five tiers running from Highly Transparent down to Opaque (JLL, Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2026). The index does not measure prices, yields or growth. It measures whether the principal can find the data needed to price a deal without paying a local intermediary simply to interpret a registry that will not publish itself.

The 260 factors group into six sub-indices: performance measurement (25%), market fundamentals (16.5%), governance of listed vehicles (10%), regulatory and legal (23.5%), transaction process (15%) and sustainability (10%) (JLL, GRETI 2026 Global Rankings and Methodology). A market scores well when performance and fundamentals data are published, when the legal and regulatory framework is clear enough to model, and when the transaction process is disclosed rather than reconstructed after the fact by a broker network. None of these factors describe the return on any asset. They describe the cost of finding out what is true before capital commits.

JLL's headline finding for 2026 is a liquidity effect, not a safety claim, and the distinction matters for how an allocator should read everything that follows. Transaction volumes in the thirteen Highly Transparent markets rose 64% over the two years to 2026, twenty percentage points faster than the rest of the 88 markets tracked, and that tier alone now accounts for 56% of the world's income-producing real estate and more than 80% of global direct investment (JLL / PR Newswire, Transparency Is a Key Factor in Global Real Estate Investment Growth, 15 September 2026). Read plainly, the index behaves less like a ranking of trustworthy countries and more like a leading indicator of where capital can exit on a predictable timetable, and where it cannot.

Where do Italy, the UAE, Indonesia and Tanzania sit?#

Of the four markets this piece was asked to place, only Dubai and Abu Dhabi carry a published 2026 score; Italy's most recent confirmed position is from the 2024 edition, Indonesia's is also from 2024, and Tanzania appears only as one of ten African markets named opaque, with no individual rank or score attached. That gap in what is knowable is itself a fact worth stating before any comparison is drawn between the four.

Dubai ranked 17th globally in the 2026 index with a score of 1.98, an eleven-place jump from 28th in 2024, ahead of Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Denmark, Norway and South Korea by name (Emirates 24|7, Dubai real estate ranks 17th globally for transparency in 2026, 16 September 2026, citing JLL/LaSalle GRETI 2026). Abu Dhabi rose to 33rd from 41st, scoring 2.42, and JLL named it the cycle's leading global improver on the strength of public transaction dashboards, unit-level service-charge disclosure and open data APIs (Khaleej Times, Abu Dhabi named world's most improved real estate market for transparency, 28 September 2026). Dubai and Abu Dhabi are scored as separate city markets within the UAE, a reminder that "the UAE" is not a single underwriting jurisdiction even inside one index.

Italy's most recently published GRETI position placed it 19th globally in the Transparent tier in the 2024 edition, below the thirteen Highly Transparent markets, which in the 2026 edition are the United Kingdom, France, Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Japan and Singapore (Real Estate Pambianco, L'Italia al 19esimo posto della classifica mondiale dei paesi più trasparenti, 20 September 2024; JLL, Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2026). A named 2026 rank for Italy was not located in the sources checked for this article. What is confirmed is the relative position: Dubai's 2026 score of 1.98 now sits ahead of Italy's, stated directly by Emirates 24|7 and not the case in the prior cycle.

Indonesia's most recently published position is also 2024: semi-transparent tier, 40th globally, score 2.81, ranked above the Philippines and Vietnam and below Thailand and Malaysia (Koran Properti, Indeks Transparansi Investasi Properti, Indonesia Berada di Peringkat 40 Dunia, 18 September 2024, citing JLL GRETI). No Indonesia-specific 2026 score was located for this piece. JLL's own 2026 regional commentary names India, Vietnam, South Korea, Australia and Thailand among the year's ten strongest global improvers; Indonesia is not on that list, which is directional evidence, not confirmation of an unchanged score (JLL, reported by PropertyMarkets News, 21 September 2026).

Tanzania is named once in the sources reviewed: as one of ten African markets JLL classifies as opaque in the 2026 edition, alongside Rwanda, Tunisia, Côte d'Ivoire, Algeria, Uganda, Senegal, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia (African Manager, La Tunisie 74ème sur 88 dans l'indice mondial de transparence immobilière, 25 September 2026, citing GRETI 2026). No individual Tanzania rank or score was published in that source. The same article puts South Africa as the most transparent African market at 29th globally, with Kenya, Mauritius and Morocco in the semi-transparent band between South Africa and the opaque group.

Does a high transparency score mean the market is safe?#

No. JLL's index scores the availability of data, not the honesty of who owns what sits behind it. A market can score well on transaction-process disclosure and land-registry digitisation while still allowing anonymous corporate ownership of the same real estate, which is a distinct risk the transparency index is not built to catch, because it is not the question the index asks.

The clearest illustration sits in Italy, and it comes from an entirely different index. The Tax Justice Network's Real Estate Secrecy Index, introduced alongside its 2026 Financial Secrecy Index update and published 23 June 2026, ranked Italy 9th globally with a secrecy score of 80, and grouped it with the United Kingdom among jurisdictions with large markets but somewhat better transparency than the worst performers; the United States ranked first (Tax Justice Network, Introducing the Real Estate Secrecy Index, 23 June 2026). A separate account of the same index reported Italy at a secrecy score of 80 out of 100 and the only EU jurisdiction in that index's global top ten for secrecy risk (Il Fatto Quotidiano, Italia unico Paese Ue nella classifica mondiale della segretezza immobiliare, 1 July 2026, citing Tax Justice Network). That index measures something JLL's does not: how easily a shell company or a trust can hold title without naming a beneficial owner. Italy's GRETI position describes process transparency. The secrecy index describes ownership opacity. Both can be true about the same country in the same year.

For the principal, the operating conclusion is narrow: a favourable transparency tier lowers the cost of finding public information about a market; it says nothing about who is standing behind the seller's corporate entity in a specific transaction. Beneficial-ownership verification remains a separate, non-optional step in due diligence regardless of a market's GRETI tier, a point developed at length in the documents a developer should show you.

The Dubai Land Department as the index's reference case#

Coverage of the 2026 index describes the Dubai Land Department as a leader in providing real-time, publicly accessible real estate data, the model the rest of the index rewards. The Dubai REST programme, the Mollak service-charge billing system and the expanded use of blockchain in property registration are cited as the developments behind Dubai's eleven-place jump to 17th globally in 2026 (Emirates 24|7, Dubai real estate ranks 17th globally for transparency in 2026, 16 September 2026). This is a description of infrastructure, not of investment quality. It explains why a title or a service-charge history in Dubai can often be checked from a browser rather than through a local intermediary paid to interpret a paper file.

Abu Dhabi followed a comparable path in the same cycle, and the mechanism is the same one JLL is rewarding across the index. Its 2026 score of 2.42 reflects public dashboards for real-time property and market data, interactive maps showing unit-level transactions and service charges, and open APIs for third-party data integration (Khaleej Times, 28 September 2026). JLL named Abu Dhabi the year's leading global improver on that basis, an eight-place rise from 41st to 33rd.

The mechanism worth isolating from both cases is publication, not new regulation. Dubai and Abu Dhabi did not necessarily change what was legal; they changed what became visible without a specific request to a specific office. For an allocator, the practical effect is a lower marginal cost per transaction checked, because the public register itself performs disclosure work that a lawyer would otherwise have to bill for, office by office, document by document.

Does Ras Al Khaimah publish data the same way Dubai does?#

Not on the evidence available. Ras Al Khaimah's land and property records are administered by the Lands and Properties Sector of Ras Al Khaimah Municipality, a department with roots in a 1958 documentation and registration office that became an independent department in 1976 and was restructured under municipal government by Amiri Decree in 2014 (RAK Municipality, Lands & Properties Sector, organisational structure). Property registration, title-deed renewal and inheritance division run through that department's e-services portal, and a separate legal framework, Law No. 11 of 2021, governs the RAK land register itself (STA Law Firm, Guide to Law Number (11) Of 2021 on Land Register in Emirates of Ras Al Khaimah).

What was not found, across the public sources checked for this article, is a Dubai REST equivalent: the Lands and Properties Sector publishes annual, semi-annual and monthly transaction statistics reports covering 2015 to 2025, but no public transaction dashboard, no unit-level service-charge disclosure and no open API comparable to what Abu Dhabi and Dubai now publish was located. That absence is not proof that Ras Al Khaimah is opaque. JLL's index does not appear to score Ras Al Khaimah as an independent city market at all within the 146 cities covered, so no published tier or rank exists to compare against Dubai's 17th or Abu Dhabi's 33rd either way. The honest statement is narrower than a verdict: the comparison this article was asked to make cannot be drawn from a published score, only from the absence of one.

For the allocator, that absence is itself the underwriting input, not a gap to be filled by assumption. Where a GRETI score exists, due diligence can lean in part on a third party's published, dated data. Where no such score exists, the burden of verification shifts back onto the buyer's own counsel and the seller's own disclosure, which is the same condition the freehold and title-risk questions in emerging resort markets already turn on more broadly (see the freehold question in emerging resort markets).

Why a semi-transparent tier raises the cost of diligence, not just the risk#

Indonesia's most recently published position, semi-transparent at 40th globally with a score of 2.81 in the 2024 edition, sits below both the Highly Transparent and the Transparent tiers. The practical translation for an allocator is not a warning sign; it is a line item to budget. As a Victaura Research assumption, not a JLL finding, semi-transparent tiers tend to go with registries that are not fully digitised, transaction data that lags the market rather than tracking it, and disclosure that depends more on a counterparty's voluntary cooperation than on a public system that publishes regardless of who asks.

That difference shows up as time and professional fees, not as a measured probability of fraud, and the two should not be conflated. As a Victaura Research assumption, with no measured benchmark behind it, a title search that a Highly Transparent market's public register can answer quickly can take considerably longer and require more than one local counsel opinion in a Semi-Transparent one, because the missing piece is typically not the underlying law but the infrastructure around it: no single public system to query, so verification runs sequentially through several separate offices instead of through one digitised source.

This is a Victaura Research assumption about how the tiers translate into diligence work, not a JLL definition and not a measured cost figure specific to Indonesia. No independent benchmark of Indonesian title-search duration or associated legal fees was found in the course of researching this article. The honest position is to flag the mechanism the tier definition implies and stop there, rather than attach a precision the underlying research does not support.

What an opaque rating means for Tanzania#

Tanzania carries JLL's lowest tier in the 2026 edition: opaque, one of ten African markets classified that way, alongside Rwanda, Tunisia, Côte d'Ivoire, Algeria, Uganda, Senegal, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. No individual Tanzania rank or score was published in the source reviewed for this article, only the tier assignment itself, which limits how precisely its position can be described relative to the other nine markets in the same band.

An opaque rating does not mean a market has no transactions; it means the public tools available to verify them from outside the market are thin or absent. As a Victaura Research assumption, not a JLL definition, that condition typically corresponds to a land registry that is not fully digitised, limited public disclosure of comparable transaction prices, and a legal and regulatory framework that is harder for an outside party to research without counsel resident in the jurisdiction and familiar with how it actually operates day to day, as distinct from how the statute reads on paper.

For an allocator underwriting anything in an opaque-tier market, the index's implicit instruction is to substitute local, in-person verification for the public data the index rewards elsewhere in its rankings. That means title searches conducted physically rather than remotely, contracts checked against the specific statute in force in that jurisdiction rather than a generic regional summary, and a wider allowance, in both time and legal cost, for the diligence work that a Transparent-tier market would otherwise let a public register perform for free.

Liquidity is the variable the index actually prices#

The single hardest number in JLL's 2026 release is the 64% figure, and it is a volume statistic, not a safety statistic, a distinction worth restating because the two are easy to blur when a report is compressed into a headline. Transaction volumes in the thirteen Highly Transparent markets rose 64% over the two years to 2026, twenty percentage points ahead of the other markets tracked, and those thirteen markets account for more than 80% of global direct investment (JLL / PR Newswire, 15 September 2026).

Liquidity is what an allocator is actually pricing when a transparency tier changes, more than any change in the underlying asset itself. A market that publishes transaction data lets a seller find a buyer faster, because the buyer's own diligence costs less to complete. That is the mechanism behind why capital concentrates in Highly Transparent tiers: not that those markets are inherently better assets on a risk-adjusted basis, but that the exit from them is cheaper to verify, which shortens the marketing period a seller needs to accept a fair price.

The inverse holds for every tier below Highly Transparent, including the three lower tiers relevant to the four markets in this review. A Semi-Transparent or Opaque classification does not forecast a bad outcome on any individual asset held within that market. It forecasts a narrower buyer pool at the point of exit, because fewer buyers will accept the higher verification cost the tier implies, and among those who will still transact, more of them will price that added cost into the offer they make.

What the index cannot tell the principal#

JLL's index is a market-level score, not an asset-level one, and a Highly Transparent country can still contain an individual title with a defect the index has no mechanism to flag. The unit of measurement is the country or the city, aggregated across 260 factors weighted for the market as a whole. It says nothing about the specific parcel, the specific seller, or the specific chain of title an allocator is underwriting in any given week, however favourable the surrounding market's tier happens to be.

The index is also a lagging, biennial snapshot, and treating a 2026 score as a live indicator misreads what the publication schedule actually allows. The 2026 edition reflects data and survey responses gathered before its 14 September publication date, and on JLL's biennial schedule the next edition would be expected in 2028. A market can change its land-registry law in the interim without any published re-score until then. Abu Dhabi's eight-place jump this cycle is itself evidence of how much can move in two years; nothing inside the index updates faster than the index's own two-year cycle.

Coverage itself is uneven, and this article's own research demonstrated that directly rather than as an abstract caveat. A confirmed 2026 score exists for Dubai and for Abu Dhabi. Italy's most recent confirmed score is from 2024. Indonesia's most recent confirmed score is also from 2024. Tanzania carries a tier with no published individual rank or score at all in the sources reviewed. Where the index is silent, silence is not evidence of either transparency or opacity; it is evidence only that this particular instrument does not cover that gap, which means another source has to be found, or the gap has to be disclosed as genuinely unresolved rather than quietly assumed.

Finally, the index measures process, not enforcement, and the two are not the same thing even where they correlate. A jurisdiction can score well for having a rule on the books that is digitised and publicly disclosed, while enforcement of that same rule in a contested court case remains slow or inconsistent in practice. JLL's own factor set includes a legal and regulatory category for exactly this reason, but a high score in that category describes what the law says exists on paper. It does not describe how reliably a court applies it once two parties actually disagree.

What this means for an underwriting process#

A transparency tier is one input among several, and it belongs earlier in the process than most allocators place it, before a term sheet is drafted rather than after one is signed. Knowing that a market sits in JLL's Transparent tier tells the allocator that public data will likely answer most factual questions about comparable pricing and standard process. Knowing a market sits in Semi-Transparent or Opaque tells the allocator, at the same early stage, to budget more time and more local counsel before relying on anything the seller alone chooses to provide.

None of this substitutes for the document-level checks that apply regardless of a market's published tier: verified title, verified seller identity, and, where the asset is off-plan, a payment schedule verifiably tied to construction milestones rather than to a calendar date. Those checks do not become optional simply because a transaction sits in a Highly Transparent market, and they do not become sufficient on their own simply because a transaction sits in an Opaque one. What the tier changes is how much of that verification work a public system performs for the allocator at no cost, and how much has to be paid for privately, office by office.

The four markets reviewed here sit at four different points on that scale, and none of the four positions should be read as a verdict on any specific asset located within them. Dubai and Abu Dhabi now publish more, and more recently, than most of the 88 markets JLL tracks. Italy's most recently confirmed position, 19th in the Transparent tier in 2024, sits ahead of the Semi-Transparent and Opaque tiers discussed here, though its separately measured ownership-secrecy exposure runs on a different axis entirely and should not be confused with its GRETI position. Indonesia's semi-transparent tier means added time and added counsel, not added danger to any given transaction. Tanzania's opaque tier means the public system will do almost none of the allocator's diligence work by itself, so the private system, meaning the allocator's own lawyers and local advisers, has to do essentially all of it.

Skin in the game disclosure. Victaura, through its parent Greystone B.V. (Netherlands), develops projects on Lake Como (Italy), in Nungwi, Zanzibar (Tanzania), on Gili Air and in Uluwatu, Bali (Indonesia), and holds an off-plan capital position on Al Marjan Island, Ras Al Khaimah (UAE). Readers should assume commentary may be influenced by, or benefit, these positions. This document is classified as marketing material under MiFID II Article 24(3). It is not investment advice.