I’ve been in this industry for 27 years. Long enough to remember when a “database” was a Rolodex, when a listing went out by fax, and when “follow-up” meant a Post-it note stuck to your monitor. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: for all the technology that’s landed on our desks since then (CRMs, portals, WhatsApp, dashboards), the day-to-day of being an agent, or running a team of them, hasn’t actually changed that much.
And it’s the client who feels it most. A question that sits unanswered for a day. A follow-up that never comes because the agent got busy with someone else. Details that arrive late, or not quite clearly enough, at the exact moment a buyer needed certainty. None of that is anyone being careless. It’s just what happens when good people are stretched across too much manual work. Clients deserve answers that are faster, clearer, and on time, every time, not only when an agent happens to have a free hour.
I’ve spent a lot of that time in leadership, watching the same pattern play out no matter how good the tools were supposed to be:
- Agents drowning in admin instead of selling.
- Leads that get a first reply in hours, sometimes a full day later, by which point the buyer has already spoken to someone else.
- CRMs that are, in practice, decoration. Agents don’t update them, because updating them doesn’t close deals, and agents live in an “eat what you kill” world where every hour spent on data entry is an hour not spent on the next call.
- Leadership trying to see the business clearly through a fog of spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads, and half-updated pipelines, which makes it nearly impossible to actually manage the funnel, coach the team, or know where the real leakage is happening.
None of this is a people problem. Agents aren’t lazy and admin staff aren’t careless. It’s a systems problem: the industry has never built infrastructure that matches how deals actually get done.
Why I’m Doing Something About It
This is why I’m genuinely excited (not in the throwaway sense of that word, but properly excited) to share that I’m joining a new AI-native real estate brokerage as Founding Global Head of Brokerage. We’re not ready to put the name out publicly just yet, but I can tell you exactly what it is and why it matters.
This isn’t a CRM. It isn’t another portal. It’s not a plugin bolted onto an old way of working, and it’s not tech support for a brokerage. It’s a tech-backed brokerage in its own right: a fully licensed brokerage, built from day one with AI running underneath it, instead of a business that was designed for phone calls and spreadsheets with software bolted on top afterward.
Put plainly: we’re not here to make an agent’s day slightly easier. We’re building toward a stage where a single agent can perform at 10x what they do today, not by working 10x harder, but because everything that isn’t the actual skill of selling gets taken off their plate.
What does that actually look like in practice?
- A lead that messages on WhatsApp gets a response in seconds, not hours. That’s the single biggest lever in this business, because the numbers are brutal: buyers overwhelmingly go with whoever responds first, and most leads that go quiet were never actually dead, they were just never followed up with properly.
- Listings, CRM entries, KYC document chasing, RERA paperwork, NOC tracking (the 40+ hours of admin that eats every single deal) handled in the background, so agents spend their time where they actually add value: in front of clients, at viewings, in negotiations.
- Leadership finally gets a real-time, accurate picture of the pipeline. Not a spreadsheet somebody half-updated on a Friday. The actual state of the business, as it stands, right now.
Our own modelling backs this up: a traditional brokerage needs a large agent headcount to hit a healthy volume of closed deals each year. We’re building toward doing that same volume with a fraction of that headcount, because the agent’s time stops being eaten by chasing, chasing, and more chasing.
The human side of the business doesn’t disappear. If anything, it becomes more important. A licensed broker still runs the viewing. A person still handles the negotiation and gives buyers the reassurance they want when they’re wiring hundreds of thousands of dollars from another country. What disappears is everything around that human moment that shouldn’t have needed a human in the first place.
The Team Behind It
I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe in the people building it.
Our CEO and Co-Founder was the Founding Head of Investments & Portfolio at a major MENA venture fund, where he also built out the Finance and Ops functions. Before that, McKinsey, working across investment funds, venture ecosystems, and real estate strategy. He brings the strategic and financial discipline this business needs to scale properly, not just quickly.
Our CPTO and Co-Founder led and scaled the tech team at one of the region’s biggest property portals (a unicorn every one of us has used) to over 100 engineers. He was also VP of Engineering at a global unicorn for three years, and before that at another leading property portal. He has actually built and shipped technology at the scale this industry needs, which is rarer than it should be in proptech.
And my part in it: bringing 27 years of on-the-ground experience in this market. What actually happens between a lead coming in and a deal closing, where the friction really lives, and what agents need (not what we assume they need) to trust a new way of working. Technology only matters if the people using it will actually adopt it, and that’s the piece I’m here to get right.
Why Now
I’ll be honest. I’ve seen plenty of “the future of real estate” pitches over the years, and most of them were software companies trying to sell brokerages a tool. That’s not what this is. What we’re building is a licensed brokerage, tech-backed from the ground up, which means it can actually fix the handoffs between lead gen, qualification, viewings, compliance, and closing, instead of optimizing one step while the rest stays broken.
Dubai’s market has been through downturns before and always come back stronger and faster than the last one. The fundamentals here (a massive international buyer base, a digital-first regulator, and a huge amount of value still trapped in inefficient processes) make this exactly the right place and the right time to build this properly.
More on this soon. For now: if you’re an agent who’s tired of chasing leads instead of closing them, or a broker who’s ever wondered why your CRM looks the way it does on a Monday morning, this one’s for you.
We’re Looking for a Founding Broker
We’re in the earliest stages, and we’re looking for a Founding Broker to join us and help build this from the ground up, real equity, a real say in how this is shaped, and a seat at the table before any of it is public. If that’s you, or you know who it should be, reach out.
Laura