In Dubai one rental document unlocks everything else, and nobody explains the order
I work in vocational training and moved to Dubai from Cairo three years ago with two children. Nobody told me that here the paperwork has an order, and if you get the order wrong you simply wait.
The centre of it is the registered tenancy contract. Not the paper you sign with the landlord, the registered one. Almost everything downstream asks for it: the electricity and water account, the internet, and the school registration.
So the sequence people actually need is residency, then the registered tenancy, then utilities, then the school. I did it in a different order because I assumed the school only needed proof that I existed. It needed proof of where I lived, registered, in the right format.
Two things that cost me real time.
The landlord is the one who registers it, and some are slow. Ask before signing how quickly they do it, and get the answer in writing. A cheaper flat with a landlord who registers in six weeks is not cheaper if your child is waiting for a school place.
And the address has to match everywhere, exactly. Towers here often have two names, the marketing name and the registered one. That cost me a week of explaining myself at three different counters.
When we were choosing the area I was comparing across the emirates on https://middle-east.realestate/ because the school you want and the rent you can afford are frequently not in the same emirate, and that trade off is much easier to see when the listings sit in one place.
If anyone here has moved to the Gulf with school-age children, I would be interested in how you sequenced it. I am fairly sure I did it the slow way.