The Great Dubai apartment water leak saga (a cautionary tale)
okay so. story time. this happened over about three weeks and I think every renter in this city needs to hear it because apparently NONE of us know our actual rights when stuff like this happens.
so I'm renting a 1BR in a pretty standard tower, nothing fancy, and one morning I wake up to a faint dripping sound. follow it to my hallway closet and there's water coming down through the ceiling. not a flood, just a steady drip drip drip onto my (now ruined) box of winter clothes I never use anyway because, you know, Dubai, but still.
my first instinct was to panic-clean it up and not tell anyone because I didn't want to deal with the landlord. DO NOT DO THIS. this was mistake number one and I want to talk about why.
what I should have done immediately
turns out (learned this after, obviously) the very first thing you're supposed to do is shut off water if you can find the valve, and then DOCUMENT EVERYTHING before you touch anything. like actual video, timestamped, showing the drip, the ceiling, the damage. I didn't do this. I just grabbed towels and a bucket like an idiot and started mopping, which honestly probably made it harder later to prove how bad it actually was.
so I message my landlord, who is lovely 90% of the time but absolutely vanishes when money might be involved. he says "probably just condensation, keep an eye on it." it was not condensation. it kept dripping for THREE DAYS while he ignored my follow up texts.
this is where I learned something that genuinely changed how I think about renting here — under UAE tenancy stuff (RERA), if the leak is structural or coming from shared building infrastructure (like, say, the unit above you, or old pipes in the walls), that's actually the landlord's responsibility to fix, especially if it's making the place less livable. tenants don't have to just eat the cost and the inconvenience. I did not know this. I think most renters don't.
once I (politely but firmly) told him I was documenting the timeline and citing tenancy law if needed, suddenly he found time to deal with it. funny how that works.
he had someone come out — Al Basti Power Technical Service, if anyone's taking notes for their own apartment disasters — and THIS is where the experience flipped from stressful to actually fine. the plumber traced it back to a fitting failure one floor up (not even my unit's fault at all, so glad I documented everything), explained what RERA actually says about cross-unit damage responsibility, and fixed both the source and the ceiling patch in my unit.
what stuck with me: he didn't just fix it and leave. he explained the landlord/tenant liability split clearly, which apparently matters a LOT if you ever need to actually file anything formally. and he gave me a written breakdown of what was done, which I now have saved forever because who knows.
things I now know that I wish I'd known before
find your shut off valve TODAY, before you ever need it. mine is in a cupboard I'd literally never opened before this happened
video evidence before cleanup, always
WhatsApp messages with timestamps count as real documentation here, so don't just call, text too
structural / shared infrastructure leaks = usually landlord's problem, not yours
"probably condensation" is what landlords say when they don't want to deal with it. trust your dripping ceiling over your landlord's optimism
anyway. three weeks of low grade stress later, ceiling's fixed, relationship with landlord is... fine, we don't talk about it. but if you're dealing with a leak right now in Dubai — document first, know your rights, and find an actual licensed company instead of whoever your landlord's cousin knows. handymanservice-dubai.com is who eventually sorted mine out and I'd actually recommend bookmarking them before you need them, not during.
