Wyles Daniel
The real estate markets of the UAE are moving through a period of adjustment, even as the longer-term case for them holds firm. In Dubai the market has softened, though only modestly: prices are down about 3 percent, transactions have fallen by close to a quarter, and rents, already easing as new supply came online, dipped further as regional conflict made buyers cautious. Morocco, meanwhile, is shaping up as one of the most compelling real estate opportunities in the region, powered by its political stability, its proximity to Europe and the United States, its year-round climate, and the momentum building ahead of the 2030 World Cup.
For Lukas Kerrebijn, Co-Founder of RD Dubai, how an advisor responds to numbers like Dubai’s is the entire measure of whether they can be trusted. Much of the market has settled on a comfortable answer. The story now circulating holds that because construction costs are climbing, there is no wrong time to buy, and the claim is not without merit. Building costs were on course to rise about 3 percent even before the conflict pushed them higher, and a finished home has become cheaper to own than to rebuild, which does lend real support to existing stock. What that pitch quietly sets aside is the demand side of the ledger, and demand has clearly softened. Kerrebijn would rather say so plainly than sell around it, on the reasoning that pretending nothing has changed is the fastest way to forfeit an investor’s confidence, and that the firm honest enough to name what has weakened is the one worth believing when it points to what will hold.
A great deal does hold, and the long-term case reads today much as it did before the disruption. Rental and personal income remain untaxed, yields still sit near 7 percent, liquidity runs deep, and the market has rebuilt its footing after every previous shock, from the 2008 crash through the 2020 pandemic to earlier rounds of regional strain. Measured against the alternatives an international investor might weigh in Europe, the proposition is as strong as ever. Because Kerrebijn has always approached real estate as a long-term endeavor, he treats the current dip as a passing one, which means what changes in the near term is his method rather than his conviction.
That method has turned toward dislocation, and specifically toward the distressed and off-market deals where an owner will accept less simply to be out. RD’s own book illustrates it: a Business Bay unit that a developer first sold for 4.5 million dirhams came to the firm at 2.65 million, close to two million under the original price, in an established Dubai district Kerrebijn already had reason to trust. He has been candid that he would have paid 3 or 3.2 million and still counted it a strong deal, and that finding it far lower was a matter of negotiation and network rather than luck. Underpinning the strategy is a discipline about location, since Kerrebijn favors proven areas over undeveloped ones on the logic that established demand carries a property through a downturn while a project on the fringe depends on a future a nervous market can postpone. Where RD ventures outside the core, it does so only at a price that compensates for the added risk, treating location and cost, rather than whether the building yet stands, as what actually decides a deal. The same thinking has drawn the firm into Abu Dhabi, where transaction values rose sharply through 2025 and RD secured prime units in Sobha City, the developer’s first master community in the emirate, at Al Bahiya.
It is that same long horizon that now carries the firm beyond the Gulf. RD has acquired land in Morocco, a market Kerrebijn believes in for the decade rather than the quarter, and while he readily acknowledges that land generates no rent, he views it in a rising country as a stake in the whole trajectory rather than in any single address, an appeal that has only sharpened as capital everywhere looks for durable ground to sit on. What the firm intends to build there is where the venture becomes personal. The plan is a wellness resort of roughly 150 to 200 rooms, conceived for founders, business owners and athletes who want a retreat with a purpose, somewhere to train, recover and spend time among people of similar ambition, in an industry Kerrebijn regards as one of the fastest-growing anywhere and one his team is drawn to through genuine interest in sport, enterprise and health.
At the center of that plan sits something no financial return accounts for. Alongside the resort, RD means to build a sports complex for local children who lack the means to pursue their athletic dreams and to run it for them free of charge, an intention Kerrebijn frames not as marketing but as the oldest ambition he holds. He traces it to the age of eleven and a first visit to Africa, when he resolved that he would one day build sports facilities for young children and give them a better chance at the future, and in a real sense the resort is what makes that complex possible. The commercial reasoning stands on its own terms regardless: Morocco is politically stable, close to Europe and the nearest African nation to the United States, blessed with good weather year round, and preparing to co-host the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal, a tournament behind which the kingdom has committed roughly 20 billion dollars in infrastructure, tens of thousands of new hotel beds, and a target of 26 million annual tourists by the end of the decade, with prices around the host cities already climbing in anticipation.
What connects all three fronts is a single discipline: candor about the near term, steadiness about the long one, and a willingness to buy where conviction rather than the crowd is pointing. In Dubai that has meant a deeply discounted unit in a district built to endure, in Abu Dhabi it has meant leaning into genuine momentum, and in Morocco it means committing early to a country moving toward its moment, alongside a promise its founder made to himself long before any of this was a business.