I came into property through retail — scouting locations across city centres, shopping malls and retail parks for the clients of a consultancy. It was an education in reading a place for what it could become, not only what it was.

I set up my own firm and spent a decade doing nearly everything property can be: bulk acquisition and lot-by-lot sale of residential, much of it renovated before exit; logistics development; conversions of offices and commercial buildings into homes and hotels; residential portfolios in Germany; land parcelling in Romania; and my own buy-renovate-sell programme. I worked hands-on throughout — on site most days, alongside the engineers, following each project end to end.

For six years I sat on the advisory committee of a real estate fund managed by BNP Paribas — through the years when the difference between sound and unsound structure was being tested in real time. It taught me to read capital and governance from the inside, a perspective most operators never get.

I began working in Dubai in 2007 — first on off-plan acquisition, then ground-up development — and moved there fully in 2014. The work grew into joint ventures, the rescue of stalled projects, and renovation and repositioning. Some of it tested me: partnerships that went wrong taught me, permanently, what alignment and governance are actually worth.

Today my focus is the institutional architecture of UAE real estate — regulated fund strategies, governance frameworks, and the digital platforms beginning to unlock liquidity for a new generation of allocators. After a career spent inside deals, this is the work I find most consequential: building the framework the next phase of the market will be built on.