What if you could own a piece of property in Dubai or Riyadh without buying the entire thing? That is the idea behind Stake. Joining me is Manar Mahmassani, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Stake. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
You started your career structuring credit at Deutsche Bank for 15 years. What convinced you that real estate investing needed rebuilding from scratch?
My childhood best friend Romy was in real estate. He would sell off-plan product — which Dubai sells very well — to investors who had to wait four years until the building was completed to start making returns. That made no sense to me. So we started with that no-brainer moment: let us give people a return from day one. But equally, I had my own experience investing in real estate. Too expensive. Too time consuming. Too opaque. Too illiquid. I put all my eggs into one property right before the global financial crisis — it saw 50% up and then 75% down. I held it for 15 years and when I sold at the same price I bought, I was actually net down about 50% of my money because the mortgage had racked up so much interest. If I had a platform like Stake, where you start from as little as 500 dirhams, you would be in much better shape — averaging in, not getting the timing perfect, but compounding your returns over time.
Walk us through how fractional ownership actually works.
Stake is a digital real estate investment platform that lets anyone, anywhere in the world, invest in real estate in Dubai currently and Saudi Arabia. We are regulated by the FSRA in Dubai and the CMA in Saudi Arabia. We screen daily for property deals from the largest brokers in the secondary marketplace — ready homes only, not off-plan. We select about 2 to 3% of the deals offered to us. Once we structure, underwrite, and package the product, we list it on the platform for investors to come in from as little as 500 dirhams. We aggregate the investors — the FSRA has a framework for this activity — and we create an SPV, a special purpose vehicle, for every single property. Once the fundraise is complete, investors come in as shareholders in that SPV, and the SPV acquires the property. We have grown to about 600 properties under management and about 1.5 billion dirhams in total transactions through the platform. And we are now on to the next thing — the transition to the blockchain.
How does Abu Dhabi's property market and investor base differ from Dubai?
Quite a few ways actually — very different investor profiles, different ticket sizes, and different motivations for investing. That is exactly what our next phase of expansion is focused on understanding and serving properly.
Thank you so much for joining us.
