Sobha 60/40 Payment Plan: A Buyer's Walkthrough

Sobha Realty's flagship structure is the 60/40: roughly 60% of the purchase price paid in installments during construction, and a substantial 40% at completion. It is a buyer-friendly shape during the build — and it concentrates a very large final obligation exactly where most people plan least.

The typical shape

Terms vary by project and launch, but a Sobha 60/40 usually looks like:

• Booking — an initial deposit (commonly 10%, sometimes with a defined amount at SPA signing).
• Construction installments — the balance of the 60%, in stages through the build, frequently tied to construction milestones rather than pure calendar dates.
• Completion payment — the remaining 40% when the unit is ready.

On a AED 3,000,000 unit, that final call is AED 1,200,000 — before adding the fees, deposits and service-charge advances that cluster at handover.

Why the 40% deserves a plan of its own

A completion payment this size behaves less like an installment and more like a second down-payment. There are only three ways to meet it: cash you have parked, a mortgage on the completing unit, or selling the unit before completion. Each has a lead time — mortgage approval and valuation take weeks; a resale takes longer — so the funding decision needs to be made well before the completion notice arrives, not after.

A useful discipline: from the day you sign, treat the completion amount as a dated liability and track your funding progress against it the way you track the installments themselves.

Milestone-linked means movement

Sobha's construction-linked installments move with the build. When a project's handover estimate shifts, your unpaid installments and the 40% completion call shift with it — the intervals between payments stay as the SPA set them; the anchor moves. Keep every revised-handover notice and re-baseline your schedule from it (our construction-delay guide covers the mechanics). A delay usually buys you time on the big payment — time you only benefit from if your plan reflects it.

The checklist for a 60/40 buyer

1. Map every installment — amount, trigger, date — from the SPA's payment appendix.
2. Put the 40% in your calendar as a funding project with its own milestones (decision, mortgage pre-approval, liquidity).
3. Track construction notices and re-baseline when handover moves.
4. Budget the handover cluster: completion payment + registration/admin + snagging period + service-charge advance.

PlanGuard automates the mechanics: upload the SPA and the full 60/40 schedule builds itself, reminders run ahead of every installment, the handover command center counts down to the 40% with a funding plan against it, and the schedule re-baselines when the developer's dates move.

General information, not financial advice. Structures vary by project — your signed SPA is the binding source.