The End of the Transaction: What Dubai Operators Must Now Prove

Dubai’s advisory market is no longer built on the private buyer alone. Family offices and structured funds now sit alongside the individuals who once made up most of the demand. Private buyers have not disappeared, but they no longer define the market. The increasing presence of institutional money has changed what operators must prove before a deal is signed, and it is raising the standard expected of advisory firms across the city.

Lukas Kerrebijn, co-founder of RD Dubai, says investors now want alignment, accountability, and a relationship that survives the closing of a deal. The era in which a signature marked the end of an engagement is closing. That is a cultural shift for firms used to collecting a commission and moving on.

Kerrebijn criticizes much of the market for still trying to get people to buy for the sake of the commission. He says RD Dubai could sell a thousand projects tomorrow. Instead, the firm has gone two months without a project it considered good enough. It would rather wait than sell something unworthy. Deliberate selectivity explains that.

Securing quality assets at the right prices and payment plans takes time. So does persuading developers to accept RD Dubai’s terms. Volume-driven brokers, Kerrebijn argues, have no incentive to spend time on careful selection. Patience is what he treats as RD Dubai’s differentiator, and it is the quality he says separates his firm from the volume-driven end of the market.

Many firms, he says, care only about the signature on the purchase agreement and stop caring afterward. RD Dubai’s relationship runs from purchase through handover and beyond, into finding tenants and managing the asset. That reflects how the company has changed. RD Dubai was co-founded as an off-plan advisor guiding clients toward projects. It is now a principal as much as an advisor, or as Kerrebijn puts it, a “strategic partner.”

RD Dubai takes stakes in projects and resells part of them. That structure shows commitment and helps secure better pricing. The next step is to bring the firm’s closest partners into a fund and into redevelopment projects RD Dubai runs. These are designed to generate returns rather than hold property in an investor’s own name. The fund and the redevelopment projects would let those investors participate without holding a title deed. Kerrebijn describes the audience as people who want returns, not a property in their name. RD Dubai buys, redevelops, and sells projects, which makes the redevelopment work attractive to purely financial investors.

As money becomes more institutional, capital underwrites operators the way it underwrites assets, on fundamentals rather than marketing. Kerrebijn believes alignment and execution will carry the next cycle, while brand and momentum carried the previous one. A firm can still win attention with a big announcement; keeping the mandate is a different test. An adviser’s reputation will come less from the deal it announces and more from how it behaves after the announcement. The transaction is no longer the product; the relationship is.