Can Tokenisation Open Dubai Property to the Other 75%?

Alastair: Okay, it's a new episode of Block by Block. I'm sat in the interviewer's chair today and I want to welcome Rakesh from Takeem. The reason we wanted to get you on today is we're building the number one proptech podcast in the UAE, and it started off just talking to people directly within our network, but as we've spoken about before, the entire proptech industry is so interwoven, and therefore we want to get on the best of the best in terms of builders and people that are innovating. Which is why we wanted to get you on, and also to hear about your story and what you're building with Takeem. But just to start off, I guess it would be great if you could just give us a bit of background about yourself and about Takeem for those that aren't aware of what it is you guys are doing.

Rakesh: Thank you for having me on, and thank you for that little bump there in the intro. It's good to be on the number one proptech podcast in the Middle East, or Dubai, or UAE, or...

Alastair: All of it.

Rakesh: Let's just say GCC.

Alastair: Yeah, let's go the world.

Rakesh: Right? We have global ambitions. All of us, right? So I'm Rakesh. I am a long-term Dubai resident, 27 years now. I'm the cliché Dubai story: came out on a 3-month contract and now it's home. Like there is nowhere else. It's just home. So that's basically my story. I've gone through many different iterations. I was in the music industry for 20 years.

Alastair: Okay.

Rakesh: Had a lot of success in that, then finance, and now proptech. Stemming from a very unusual start, I'll say that. No experience in real estate previous to this. I did have broking experience but in a different field, but it was just a catalyst that I just couldn't stand by and watch it keep on happening. So that's my journey to where I am today.

Alastair: Fantastic. And before we jump into that personal story, which I really want to explore with you, can you just give a brief overview of what Takeem is, what it does, who it serves?

Rakesh: So the whole goal of Takeem, the mission of Takeem, is to take the anxiety out of renting and owning. We do that with our first MVP product, which is the Takeem rental guarantee. It has three pillars. There's rent protection, so if your tenant doesn't pay or can't pay, we will cover the landlord. It also has an emergency maintenance cover aspect, and then of course digital payments. So with that solution, we think that we can build that trust infrastructure that's required in any mature rental market.

Alastair: Amazing. And you mentioned that the origin story is personal. You kind of brought this up in a few interviews you've had, and from my understanding, it started when your landlord kept your deposit, right? But I guess at what point does that go from being "this is pretty annoying" to "I'm going to build an entire business and solve this problem"?

Rakesh: Maybe I have a really low tolerance. But it was actually the second time that it happened to me. So that's my personal story. My co-founder has a different personal story. I come from the tenant's point of view. I had those frustrations around security deposits not being returned, maintenance issues not being fixed quickly enough, the upfront check system, and the affordability that goes along with it. My co-founder Puja, who's a landlord, had the frustrations from the other side: tenants not paying, having to fix those maintenance issues, and dealing with the manual check system. So when we got together and had conversations, I was expressing my frustrations from my side, she was expressing the frustrations from her side. And rather than see it as we're on different sides of the equation, we're not against each other. We could actually solve the issue with a solution that lets everyone win, whether they be tenant, landlord, agent, regulator, whoever.

Alastair: It's very similar to some of the reasons we co-founded Tribe. We had a slightly different personal reason as to why: frustrations around not being able to get on the property ladder, general frustrations at how old-fashioned and illiquid property and real estate investment was. But do you think it takes a certain kind of person to go from having just a frustration and being annoyed, going, "you know what, I'm going to commit all of my time and all of my effort into building a business from nothing to try and solve this"?

Rakesh: I actually think about this quite a lot, because I have a very entrepreneurial mindset. I'm not a good employee. I've always worked in positions where it's always you eat what you kill. So you're driven by yourself. It's very self-driven. Entrepreneurship, being a founder, may be glorified, but when you do the day-to-day stuff, it's not glorified at all. It's a lot of hard work, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. So I think it takes a very special type of person to have the grit and the resilience to do that. And most of the time that grit and resilience has come from a lot of failures. Now, segue here: we're coming into an AI world where a lot of occupations are going to be taken by AI. The counter-argument to that is, AI is actually going to help a lot of people start new businesses, and I agree with that. But you still have to have that mentality of entrepreneurship, that grit and resilience, even if you do have an AI tool, to be able to build a business as a founder. And I think the percentage of companies that actually start and then quickly fade into non-existence is quite high, because the founders don't have the grit and resilience.

Alastair: And that's something that AI doesn't have built in, right? Is that grit and resilience. And we as a company are very AI-first in terms of how we're operating, to keep lean, to take full advantage of that. But it's very much a system of garbage in, garbage out, and it takes, I think the fact that you need 20 years' experience, you've done different types of jobs to actually utilise something like AI to its fullest effect, I think.

Rakesh: I agree with that. And on a segue here with AI: what I've discovered is, AI has some amazing tools. Some of them have a very long learning curve, though. Where I'm seeing the best use of AI is from people who have the experience of maybe doing it the manual way first and then switching to AI, and they're getting the best results. I've seen it in my own background, in that music industry, being able to use AI tools now. What usually took us a week, I could literally do in two or three hours now. It's incredible.

Alastair: So to bring us back, into why we're here, to the world of proptech. This is all relevant and good to talk about, but I want to talk about the Dubai rental market in particular. For years it's had structural issues, whether that be the one-check system, whether that be the deposit disputes, whatever it may be. I'd love to get your view on, number one, why is it that way? The majority of us living in Dubai are immigrants and have come from countries where the system here is completely alien to them. And then also, I guess, what then convinced you that this was a problem that was actually solvable given how ingrained that system was?

Rakesh: So we really looked at it from a first principles model. And when we looked at it, we saw that whether you're a landlord, a tenant, an owner, or an investor, you all have the same problem, which is the friction, the distrust, and the anxiety. The common element isn't the asset, it's the experience. So we looked at it from that way: what is causing that angst with the experience? And it all came down to trust. You have to be able to trust. You're looking at, for a renter in a rental market, the biggest decision of the year for 12 months. That's your biggest expense. And from a landlord, you're having someone move into your asset, which you've worked incredibly hard to be able to afford. You're dealing with trust between strangers who are working on incomplete information and misaligned incentives. And so that's where we started from, and we knew we had to solve the trust problem. And that's what we've tried to do with the Takeem rental guarantee.

Alastair: And where do you think that trust problem stems from? Why in this market has it always been the way it is, when you look at other international markets where there are monthly payments, there is that trust? Is it down to something as simple as there's no unified credit system, or...?

Rakesh: So it's a number of things. There's still mistrust, friction, anxiety in other markets as well. It's not unique here. I think it's just amplified here. And maybe that is because it was such a transient economy before. And also for the fact that many years ago, to entice people to come to the UAE, it was the company who would pay rent, and they would give the landlord that one check. It's been ingrained in the system since then. We've seen in mature rental markets that rent protection is a core ingredient in that market. It's not a nice to have, it's a must-have in agreement, because it builds stability, sustainability, and scalability of the market, because people now have that ability to trust one another as strangers.

Alastair: And then let's talk about defaults. Obviously there was a huge spike of defaults in 2019, COVID times. Then it seemed to flatline for a few years, but I guess back end of last year, start of this year, and then obviously with the geopolitical issues that have been going on in the region, they've really started to increase and then spike in the last eight weeks or so. What does your data show, and I guess what's your read on where we are right now?

Rakesh: So my read will be very different from what's recorded just because of timeliness. We've seen in the last 24 years three spikes of rental defaults: 2008, 2014 when the oil price crashed (that was a little bit of an extended one), and 2020 when we had COVID. Every six years. 2026 is the sixth year, and it's just so happened again. And it's something that we predicted would happen, whether it be because of affordability, loss of jobs, or geopolitical issues. All it needed was a catalyst, and it was going to happen. What we saw in the last quarter of 2025 was, we were hitting the affordability ceiling. Not only were we seeing loss of jobs in low- and white-collar industries, we were also seeing the affordability ceiling get hit here in Dubai and the UAE. Meaning that tenants just couldn't fathom paying what they were paying for rent, and it was a decision on whether to stay here, or go home, or move into co-living accommodations, or move to Sharjah and do the two hours of transit. That was where we saw the demand really start to fall off. So we had an issue of loss of demand. When everyone was talking about the supply, that wasn't the issue for the market. And that's the reason why the first half of 2025 was great for demand, but from April onwards it really started deteriorating. So the year finished flat. There was no demand, even though we had a massive increase in population. So the questions had to be asked, why was that? And that's what we looked further into. That kind of continued into January. February was a very stable month, actually February was looking a little bit positive until the end of February. And then the first week was a little bit quiet, then second and third week of March, the defaults really started to pick up. Fourth week of March really picked up. The numbers of volume in rental markets really dropped off on the third and fourth week. We kind of put that down to the decision to make schooling online. So a lot of people who had already left decided they didn't need to come back for school because the kids could do the schooling online. Or some of the others were like, okay, now we can go to Europe and the kids can do school from there, or wherever they wanted to go. The reason I say the timeliness is a little bit different is because we deal, we're the first point of stop for job loss. So in the industries: the tourism, the retail, the energy sector, the restaurants are starting now. We saw those job losses first. Now, what we consider a default is when someone doesn't pay or can't pay. The system here is that if a tenant bounces a check, they have 30 days to make good on that payment. After that, if they still haven't paid, the landlord can send them a legal notice. That gives them another 30 days. Then they get to file a case with the Rental Dispute Committee. That's two months. So the official recording of defaults is two months from now. It's not what we're seeing on the front line right now. And what we're seeing on the front line right now, it's looking more like 2014 again.

Alastair: It's interesting. We released an in-depth report of Q1 data with a special focus on March and what happened. And that's very much our take. Whilst there were some obvious shifts, the fallout isn't going to be seen until we refresh that data at the end of this month and then again the end of May, because there is that follow-on where actually that spike could get a bit steeper and could keep going on for longer than maybe people think.

Rakesh: So that would be on default. On the sales side of things, the sales we saw in early March were from two months ago, when deals were actually signed. It takes two months minimum for a secondary property to be registered. We're not going to see what happened in March, April till two months later. Defaults are not going to be registered as official defaults until two months later. But the effect is already happening on the ground. You can walk into any estate agent, property manager, and you can feel the shift in vibe. We look at copious amounts of data. Last year we looked at 611,821 rental contracts to be able to see what was happening in the market. That's the data. Then you have the anecdotal data, which is talking to people on the front lines: the property managers, the asset managers, the agents themselves, to understand what they're going through. Because one gives you what happened, the other one gives you what's happening right now, and putting both of them together gives you a much better picture of what's going to happen.

Alastair: And then just to go back to the point about the affordability increase that we saw over the last 12 months, but even the last 24 months. I think that's something that's impacted so many people, and so many people have got theories, conspiracy theories, data on what they think caused that. The fact is that people's capital appreciation was going up, so they were making money in terms of the value of their asset, but then rents were massively increasing at the same time. What is your view on why that happened?

Rakesh: You're bringing out the socialist in me. It's because of the wealth gap. Of the properties in Dubai, 80% are owned by investors, 20% are end users. 70% of the population rents. They don't own assets. They're not getting the benefit of this increase in wealth of assets. What they're seeing is inflation going up, the depreciation of the dollar by 10% in 2025, all the expenses going up, rent going up. Rent went up 7.6% last year, whereas salaries are only going up maybe 2%. So there's a very big gap there. I always tell people, especially looking towards the future: if you don't own assets, you're going to get left behind. Unfortunately, most people don't even have the ability to own assets. And that's why things like tokenisation, which democratises and makes it more affordable for people to get onto that asset chain, are ideal for what I see coming.

Alastair: That was one of the driving reasons behind starting Tribe, right? 75% of Dubai residents don't own any property whatsoever, given that a majority of the population are immigrants and residents. That's a crazy number. And that's one of the things that drove us to it. I've been in the region since 2012. I love the villa that I live in, but I couldn't afford to buy that villa in a million years, right? And I think it is a real problem. And it's interesting to see, and the whole point of this podcast is how different people within the proptech space are actually solving it. And quite a lot of us have got the same frustrations that have led us to build the businesses that we're building. And that's a really exciting thing. And I think there are a number of new businesses that are coming out that are solving similar problems and trying to move the entire industry to something that's more modern, but also, to your point, and it's an overused word, but does democratise, does help out people, and tries to remove that wealth from sitting in one small bucket and allow other people to access it.

Rakesh: And the more people that have buy-in, the more people that stay, the more people get that, not nostalgia, that almost loyalty, right? You own a piece of land here. You own a piece of a piece of land. But it's yours. And it's in this country. It's so important. So important.

Alastair: We've spoken about data quite a lot, and again you've been interviewed quite a few times, and most recently you've talked about how a big unlock for you guys was pulling together a load of proprietary UAE property data, especially when it came to convincing insurers to work with you. How do you build that data that doesn't exist yet?

Rakesh: A lot of grit, determination, rejection, hard work knocking on people's doors, convincing them why this data is going to help them and why it's going to help the ecosystem. Agreeing to certain conditions on the use of that data. That was something that we knew we had to build. I had a professor back in my university days. He said: if there's no confidence, you have to build evidence. And so when the international companies we were talking to said, "we'll do it for this amount," "why?", "because there's no data," I was like, okay, I have to go and build the evidence for them. And that's what we did. We built that evidence, we built that data set to be able to tell us what's happening in the defaults, what's happening in the delays. They were the first two categories we looked at. Now we also do early termination and non-renewal.

Alastair: This is something that we talk about internally at Tribe the entire time, that there's a fundamental difference between having raw data, even if you have to go out and find it from scratch, and that becoming insight, and then becoming proprietary data which can then become a moat for you as a business. How do you work through that process? Because stage one obviously is going out and getting that data, but on its own it's not going to do much, right?

Rakesh: That actually wasn't my thought pattern. I don't know if it was out of my co-founder's thought patterns either. It was just: this is what we need to build our product. This is the first step of what we need to get where we want to be. That's all we looked at at that stage. It's a combination of private and public data. Dubai does an amazing job of transparency and the data that they release. We utilise that, we utilise our private sources as well. That gives us a fuller picture on what's happening in the market. Whether it became a moat: yes, it did. But I'm not the genius who thought that was what was going to happen. It just is, because of the day-in, day-out build and the rejections that we had. We used to walk into offices and people would be like, "why are you here? We're not going to give you our data. Why would we give you our data?" And it took a few times of going back and forth to explain the benefits that they would see from it.

Alastair: And one of the core outcomes of you putting together this proprietary data, I guess, was that you've managed to convince insurers to price a risk that they'd never really modelled before, right? And I think I'm right in saying that you managed to end up getting your quotes and costs for that down by 60%.

Rakesh: Yeah. So from what we had from the international players to the local players, we were really lucky that we got supported by one of the largest local players. They saw the need for the product, and they saw the space. They're incredibly innovative. By now having that data, they could price it. They could do their models and build that into their system and be able to come back to us. The original price that we got from the international players was, this is just not viable for anyone. It's not viable for the landlord. It's not viable for the tenant. So how would it work? At that time it was, maybe we should look at something else. But then we realised, you know what, we just have to build the evidence. We have to build that data set to be able to get the proof for them to reduce the prices.

Alastair: Yeah. And one big part of building a startup is the amount of dead ends, or the amount of hypotheses that you explore and then they turn out to be completely wrong, and you have to go back to square one almost. What I'd love to understand is, maybe especially with that risk model, what were some of the things that potentially looked good on paper that didn't necessarily hold up in reality once you started pressure-testing that model?

Rakesh: So it wasn't so much that. We looked at history. We knew what history has done, we knew it would happen again. It was a matter of timing for us. Our product has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have in the current situation. So we used to get laughed out of rooms when we came to people and told them this is what's going to happen. This was 18, 20 months ago. We said there's going to be job losses. There's going to be a cost-of-living crisis. There'll be a geopolitical situation. We got the price of oil completely and utterly wrong. We were expecting it to drop. If there was no geopolitical thing, we would have seen a drop below government budgets. So that would have been a 2014 moment all over again. But the geopolitical situation has kind of affected supply and demand of oil and petrochemicals. It was literally sometimes those times where you think, we know we're right, it's just a matter of when. And you can be waiting a long time for when. And the question was always, how long is when, right? For a startup that has burn, we run our company incredibly lean. We're a very small team, we use AI tools to keep it as lean as possible, and our burn rate was ridiculously low for that reason. But it still was, you can't find product-market fit until it's a when. Even though landlords were still using our product to increase their yields in a good market, we knew that in a situation like now, this is a crucible moment for our product. It wasn't so much questioning the faith, it was questioning the timing of the faith.

Alastair: And timing is often something beyond your control.

Rakesh: It 100% is. There's a saying that no matter how long you say it is, times it by two, times it by three.

Alastair: Yeah. I think we can very much resonate with that at Tribe as well. And look, you guys have had fantastic growth in the past. I think 55,000 units or more?

Rakesh: So up to early 2025 we were up to 55,000. In the last month or so we've now jumped that up to 95,000. So over 9 billion in annual rent on-boarded onto our platform.

Alastair: Fantastic.

Rakesh: Yeah. I've been involved in some amazing startups, industries where we've created the industry and we've seen stellar growth. I've never seen anything like this. It's quite daunting, I'd say too.

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, it's a good problem to have.

Rakesh: Yeah, it is.

Alastair: So obviously the most recent catalyst has been the geopolitical instability, right? What for you was the turning point, from that first thousand clients? Where did it start to turn a corner where you could start to understand that growth a bit more, and it became a little bit more predictable in terms of getting up first to that 55,000 and then scaling from there?

Rakesh: So it was big jumps along the journey. It's a little bit different to say that the first thousand units, because it's not like they're a thousand individual people. The first thousand we got was actually two landlords. Two institutional landlords, family offices or asset managers, convincing them. That's a B2B sales cycle. We now have a B2C product, which is on our website so individual landlords could use it. But for the first year we were very strategic about how we were going to launch our product, and it was to create that B2B distribution network. So it was the property managers, the asset managers, and the family offices. Getting validation from those first two then gave us the next five. One of them was quite a big one. Them getting that validation then got us more and more. So it was almost like a snowball effect of, if we can be trusted by these people, then it gives that validation to other people. And distribution is one of the most important things in early-stage startup.

Alastair: So that was a deliberate choice for you to go that B2B route to get that one-to-many scale, which you can have as a foundation to then go on and build on top of.

Rakesh: Yeah. We saw that we created a product where every person in the ecosystem, every stakeholder wins. So we knew there would be buy-in from everyone, but we knew that distribution was key. We're not first-time founders. I'm a serial founder. My co-founder has also worked in a few startups as well as big corporates. So we knew that distribution was key for us. We didn't want to do the B2C route straight away, even though our product lends itself more to the individual landlord, because an asset manager who has a thousand units, if 100 go down in a year, it's not really affecting his bottom line. An individual with five units or three units, and one goes down, that's really affecting his bottom line and his revenue for that year.

Alastair: And then when you look at the investors that have come on board with you guys, you've got InFront, Reach, I think NAR as well. What was it, you think, that convinced them to believe in you guys? And I guess more interestingly, what were some of the things that they pushed back on?

Rakesh: So NAR was an interesting situation, because we had heard about them coming to the region nine months ago. I had seen a Twitter post by one of the VCs in America that I follow. I kind of idolise his mentality, and he was saying that a lot of the startups that he's invested with have come out of NAR. So NAR is the National Association of Realtors in America. Every single real estate agent in America is part of this trade organisation. I think it is the largest trade organisation in the world. Reach is their accelerator program, and then on top of that you have their VC, which is Second Century Ventures, which is the largest and most active proptech VC in the world. And I was constantly following the NAR Reach and the Second Century websites on when they were actually going to launch. They've done an agreement with both Dubai Land Department and Dubai Future District Fund, and they've done agreements to really promote proptech and invest in the proptech community here. So this was actually the one investor that we approached, and we said, we want to be part of you, because we know the contacts and the networks, other than the money they may have invested, of bringing them on board. Their pushback was: what's next? Like, what's next for Takeem? We like what you're doing now, but show us where you're going. And we always had a very clear path to that. But most people are interested in what we're doing now. So to be able to convince them on our north star and what we see as the future of renting, and how Takeem is going to be part of it, that was the selling point, I guess.

Alastair: And yeah, I think that's a universal thing that anyone building a startup again can empathise with, right? How do you get that balance between focusing on what is right in front of you today versus that longer-term vision, and of course all the pivots and the zigging and the zagging that inevitably happen. So how do you guys as a business deal with that, and juggle priorities, and deal with those zigs and zags that always come, often at the most unexpected times?

Rakesh: So we did have to pivot from our first original concept, where the name Takeem comes from. It comes from the Arabic word taqyim, which means to evaluate or rate. Now I westernised it and made it Takeem. But that was a review system between tenants and landlords. We had pivoted away from that because we didn't really see how we would monetise it in a growth and a scalable way. We went back to the ecosystem. We spoke with landlords, tenants, and agents. Thousands of conversations had. And we understood the real pain point before deciding what we were going to build. But we also knew that anything in the rental market, even though the tenant pays for the rent, the agency, the security deposit, everything, it's the landlord who dictates the terms of the rent. So we needed a product first that was going to build trust with the landlord. When I talk about it in retrospect, it all sounds very strategised and very clear-cut, but it wasn't in the day-to-day, of course, right? It's very much finding out data points, finding out information from people, and making decisions based on the data you have in front of you. And you're never going to have all the data in front of you, right?

Alastair: Exactly. That's very much what early stage is, right? It's evaluating what's in front of you on a day-to-day basis and trying to make decisions as quickly as possible.

Rakesh: Yeah, and hoping that they're the right ones, often with not enough information, but using what data you have, as well as experience and a little bit of gut.

Alastair: Yeah. Very much so.

Rakesh: My co-founder and I, the word data or data in our organisation, she's North American, Canadian, so it's data, and it's data, and she's data. So that always goes back and forth. Yeah, it's about just literally trusting your gut, knowing the decisions or the information that you have in front of you, and being able to make a decision on that, and to be able to make it quick enough that you don't wallow. I think that's where a lot of startups and founders really struggle. Speed of execution is everything. There are some behemoths out there that have every advantage over you in every single way. The one thing they don't have over you is the ability of speed, to be able to do things, test things, try new things. And I think that's what makes startups exciting.

Alastair: I couldn't agree more. And I think that's all of our advantages, right? How we can catch up and hopefully then take over those, but then also not lose that thought process as you start to scale. Which, having worked at a number of scaling companies, the larger they get, the slower they get, the more bureaucracy. I guess how do you then, as you grow your business, keep that same culture and decision-making as you grow? And as we discussed already in terms of AI and stuff, I guess the ability to keep your team leaner, rather than "we've got some funding, so we're just going to hire 20 people," and go, "well actually no, we're going to use that money for other purposes, we're going to stay lean." I guess means you can maintain that pace and that agility.

Rakesh: Yeah. And that's very much something that Puja and I have spoken about ad nauseam, is staying lean no matter how much funding we get. We saw what happened in 2021, 2022, when valuations of startups were going crazy and people were just all about growth, not about profitability. Then we saw 2023 and 2024 come around, it's a VC drought. All these VCs then had over-bloated valuations on their book that would now appear again later when they tried to raise more LPs. So we were always keen on keeping it as lean as possible.

Alastair: Yeah. That was a bloodbath, that period.

Rakesh: You're going to bring out the socialist in me if we keep going down that path.

Alastair: Look, I'd love to now move on to fractional real estate. Obviously, that's what we do at Tribe. Tokenised ownership, fractional property platforms. I'd love your honest take, whether that's a good take or a bad take. Do you think the model actually solves the access problem? Or do you think it just introduces a new set of complications for people? How do you feel about it in general?

Rakesh: I hate the word tokenisation. I think there's a trust issue with the word tokenisation, right, versus fractionalisation. Fractionalisation, people can kind of understand. It doesn't have a tech element so much to it. Tokenisation came from crypto, right? So people associate it with crypto. A lot of people don't trust crypto. The basis of it is, if I can buy a share in a property for only a smaller amount of money because I can't come up with the deposit to buy my own house, it is a great thing, right? You're getting on the property ladder with a much smaller investment. It's something that you can put into monthly. You could put it into an S&P 500 ETF fund. You could keep on just doing a monthly payment to a tokenisation firm. So on that side of things, the affordability nature of it, I think, is fantastic. I almost see it as an asset class. The downside of it, which is what I see, and we've just seen this recently in this market right now, is that yes, it brings affordability to many, but what it also does, and that's great in a good market. In a bad market, when you start having defaults, it's actually a multiplier as well. Because the usual standard contract is one landlord, one tenant, right? Tenant defaults, only one landlord's affected. With fractionalisation or tokenisation, you then have one tenant, 500 landlords, 100 landlords that are now getting the notifications that their tenant has defaulted. It's not one person dealing with it in private. It's now 500 people all getting the same message. That message has now been much more widely spread. It's opposite virality, I guess. The virality. Well, I'm coining my own phrase there. But that's why everything is trust. You put the trust processes in place. So even if those 500 are getting the message and you have a platform there that builds trust, they're not going to be too concerned about it. If you have a tool like Takeem, we work with tokenisation and fractionalisation companies, because even if that did happen, those 500 landlords still know that they're protected. It's not a concern now, right? It's not, "okay, legal fees are going to build up, we're not going to be able to rent the place until we do the RDC case to be able to enter the property, to take it back, remove the tenant's belongings, keep them in storage for one month as per the law." You just don't have that any more. Prevention is better than litigation. And if we can help tokenisation and fractionalisation companies give their customers that element of trust, again, it's a win-win situation. It gives more confidence in tokenisation and fractionalisation. It means more foreign investment, because the whole infrastructure is now more confident. But I think in any tool, any product, there's always positives and minuses on anything.

Alastair: Yeah. And I agree, in terms of, I think with certain types of investor, tokenisation carries negative connotations. And for us as a business, tokenisation, blockchain, that's the plumbing, right? That's the technology that's driving it, and is world-class and best-in-class. But it's not the story, it's not the hero, it's not the why. We're not doing it for the sake of it, right? And I think that's a big difference, especially when it comes to how you communicate to your potential customer.

Rakesh: Yeah. I think we had to spend a lot of time educating and making the market aware of the product, because it was the first time it was available in the GCC. I think from your side of things, it's a messaging element as well, right? You don't want them taking the negative viewpoint of tokenisation. They know it's a crypto thing, right? The blockchain thing is incredibly secure, that's why it was built, right? But it's all about getting that message across. And I think that is also another really important task that founders have. Founders, the founders themselves especially, need to be able to portray that message, but also to get it to the wider audience and say, this is the type of tokenisation we're talking about. We're not talking about meme coins or anything like that.

Alastair: Yeah. No NFTs.

Rakesh: Exactly.

Alastair: And we've spoken in terms of fractionalisation, but also we spoke about it earlier, trust is one of the biggest things. I've worked in and out of proptech in this region for over a decade, and everything always came back to trust. But in terms of something like what Tribe is doing, and also in terms of what you're doing, which do you think is the most important? Is it regulation? Is it trust at scale? What do you think the biggest barriers are to overcome for someone like Tribe, but also for yourselves, in order to take that next step forward?

Rakesh: You have to solve the trust problem first off, right? Otherwise you're going nowhere. You have to build that base layer. Once you've built that base layer, then I think it's all about validation. You can get the validation from the regulators, which is amazing, because what we're building is helping them, right? They all have a mandate to create a growing, sustainable, trustworthy real estate market. If we can help them do that, then we can get validation from them. It's validation from the main players. Our main customers have been institutional customers. They have come on board first, and we know that that will then filter down to the rest of the market. But it's all about getting that validation. Where does the validation come from? The trust that you've built. And it's the trust from doing it every single day, right? Whether it be creating content, whether it be building your product, whether it be helping other founders. It's everything that builds trust, not only in the company, but the founding team as well.

Alastair: Amazing. I'd like you to get out your crystal ball for a minute, if you will. If we're sat here in 12 months' time, what do you think the Dubai rental market looks like, and where do you think Takeem sits in that?

Rakesh: So I don't think people have priced in the risk of what is actually happening. People see the Straits of Hormuz closed. I see a lot of chat that once it opens up, everything will go back to what it was before, and that's just not economically viable. The petrochemicals, the fertiliser, the ammonia that's going to waste, the oil rigs that are going to have to be restarted, which takes months to restart an oil rig, the cost of petrol, the logistics on importing food. Everything that we have here in Dubai is mostly imported. So I think the effects are actually going to be longer than a lot of people think. I think a recovery is going to be 12 months minimum. We have to build the confidence back. There is no greater place than Dubai. There is no greater place to be a founder than Dubai, given every support that we have. My feeling is that for 27 years I've lived here, the government has supported entrepreneurship, founders, big business. There's been so many amazing incentives. They're very open-door policy when it comes to the heads of government and the people who work in government. Now is our chance to support them, right? We can support them by bringing confidence back to the market. I think the next 12 months is going to be hard for the real estate market here, but it's going to be worthwhile, because we're going to build trust and confidence to say, "yes, we dealt with this exactly like we've dealt with other things in the past. And these are the tools we've brought in, these are the incentives, these are the regulations we've brought in to make the whole market more confident for the future."

Alastair: Yeah. I think I agree with pretty much everything you just said there. It's interesting, because I think the fact is, there was a correction coming anyway. All of the data pointed towards that throughout the second half of last year. The current situation has accelerated that, and I guess the length of time it continues will define what that floor is and then what that recovery period is. And whilst the situation we're in right now is unique and different to other geopolitical issues that have happened globally, or what happened with COVID, the fact is that, to use a really cheesy word, Dubai does have that bounce-back ability, and it's proven time and time again that it can do that with the support of the government, but also with the fact that there are so many entrepreneurs here that are gritty, are determined to push through and to build here.

Rakesh: And founders, that Dubai is home, right? We have a relevance and an accountability to help the government do that, because it's for the benefit of everyone. I'm here for the next 50 years, if I last that long, to build that up and to make it the most comfortable, confident, trusted place for the long term. That's how I can help Dubai government. That's how Takeem can help the government. Tribe can help it by bringing foreign investment back to Dubai with the tokenisation. Everyone. I think the very famous John F. Kennedy quote has been running in my head for days now, is: don't ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. I think that right now in this moment is what we as Dubaians should be looking at.

Alastair: Yeah. Amazing. I wish I had a couple of flags that we can now put out.

Rakesh: I don't mean to be completely bad or anything, I mean...

Alastair: No, I mean, why not? I love it. I love it. Look, and final question. One of the reasons we're doing this podcast is because we're trying as much as possible to build Tribe in public. And one of the things we do with our advisers and with other people in the ecosystem is, we ask for their raw, unfiltered views, because it helps us to build and to improve and to be better. So what I'd love is, what would be your prediction for Tribe's road ahead? And I'd love to get both sides of what you think in terms of what are the opportunities, and what do you think the obstacles are that a brand like Tribe may face?

Rakesh: So the obstacle you're going to face right now is confidence in the whole real estate market. But once that passes, and once that confidence starts to come back, even at the very tip of that bottom, if it's a tip, whatever the nadir of that is, I think you will be one of the first companies that start to see the relevance of that. The interesting thing about this is, the people who chose to leave during these issues, I think, were the ones that could afford to do it and had the option to do it. A lot of what I would call the lower- to mid-class people in Dubai didn't really have that option. They're your investors, right? They're the ones who are going to say, "all right, if I can put a little bit away aside and own a piece of Dubai." They're the ones, the local residents that have been outpriced in the market for so long, are now going to turn around and say, "hang on a second, I can now take a piece of it. I get my piece of it." And I think that is a great thing for a company like yours. It's just going to be a bit of a slog for the next 12 months, because you're fighting against something that is much wider than the Dubai real estate market. It's a macro issue. Another good element for you is the supply that's coming on the market, right?

Alastair: I agree. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that we of course are looking at. If you're to believe the headlines, there should be distress deals falling from the sky, which of course there isn't. But of course there are great investment opportunities out there. More will come. And that's one of the things as a business that we pride ourselves on, is our ability to go out, find those deals, run the numbers to make sure they actually make sense and it's a genuinely good price rather than like an Amazon discount, you know, "was 5.6, now 5.1." It never should have been 5.6 in the first place, right? So I think from an investment point of view, there will be opportunities for people over these next 12 months whilst that recovery is ongoing. It's about how do we position ourselves to take advantage of that for our investors.

Rakesh: And I think we always talk about how, I know you don't like the word, the democratising, the affordability. But what you're actually doing also is democratising the risk. Right? From the landlord's point of view, there may be a homeowner out there that has bought an off-plan property. It's coming to the market. It may struggle to get rent if the demand's not there. It's going to be competing with lots of other supply. How does he alleviate his risk? He could turn it into a tokenised, fractionalised asset. His risk is automatically deducted, almost to an elimination maybe point, given how much he's invested in the property. He may be able to see a decent return. We don't know yet what when these off-plan properties come to the market what they're going to be valued at.

Alastair: And that's key. And again for us, that's where asset selection is key. One of our other guests made the point, you know, tokenisation isn't a magic wand that suddenly makes a poor asset a good asset, right? The underlying asset itself has to be strong. And again, that's where as a business we've spent so much time, again powered by AI, but building all these data models to really analyse every single potential property that we put on. We reject significantly more than we accept onto the platform. And I think those opportunities will come up over the next 12 months, and it's just for us a matter of being prepared to jump on them.

Rakesh: That's very similar to how we looked at the problem with long-term renting, being that the common element wasn't the asset, it was the experience. Right? If you guys can give the experience that this is a safe, trusted investment, that is a good investment, because you've done your due diligence on the property, you've done your valuations, you've pre-qualified a tenant, you've taken tools to make sure that every investor is protected. That experience is what's going to make the difference.

Alastair: I agree. I agree. Well, look, lovely. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. I enjoyed the chat. We didn't go off on too many tangents.

Rakesh: Just the AI tangent.

Alastair: Well, I mean, that was, I think, relevant. It is good. But yeah, we appreciate your time and thanks for...

Rakesh: My pleasure. It was great being here.

Alastair: Cheers, man. Thank you.