Trakheesi: what actually blocks a listing from going live
The five fields Dubai requires on every advertisement, why a permit that expires today is still valid today, and what happens to a live page the morning after one lapses.
Dubai requires a Trakheesi permit on every property advertisement. Not on portal listings specifically — on advertisements, which includes the page on your own website, the brochure you hand somebody at a viewing, and the link you paste into WhatsApp.
That is the part most agents find surprising, and it is the reason Onshow will not let a property page publish without one.
The five fields
A listing needs a permit number, a permit type, the date it was issued, the date it expires, and the issuing licence number of the brokerage. Your own broker card number has to appear on the advertisement as well, which is why Onshow asks for it once on your profile rather than on every listing.
All six have to match the certificate exactly. A transposed digit in the permit number is not a formatting problem; it is an advertisement that cannot be traced back to a real permit.
A permit that expires today is valid today
This sounds like pedantry and it is not. If you treat an expiry date as a timestamp, a permit expiring on the 14th stops working at midnight on the 13th — and in a city four hours ahead of UTC, a naive comparison takes the page down most of a day early.
Onshow compares the expiry against the current date in Dubai, so a permit expiring today keeps the page up for the whole of today. It is the last day, but it is a day.
What happens the morning after
The property page stops rendering. Not a banner, not a warning on the dashboard — the public page returns nothing, because an advertisement without a valid permit should not exist.
The listing itself is untouched. Renew the permit, update the expiry, and the page comes back at the same URL, so every link you have already sent still works. Nothing has to be re-shared.
You are warned at fourteen days, seven days and one day, on the dashboard, before any of that happens.
Why it is enforced rather than suggested
A checklist you can dismiss is a checklist that gets dismissed at 9pm when a client is waiting for a link. The gate exists because the consequence of getting this wrong lands on the agent personally, and a product that made it easy to publish without a permit would be helping you take that risk.