TAHIR MAJITHIA

Dubai now has 81,200 millionaires and 20 billionaires. A decade ago, this city wasn't even on the world's wealth radar.

Henley & Partners - The Firm of Global Citizens® released a new report on the world's wealthiest cities. Dubai's millionaire population grew 102% between 2014 and 2024, which is the fastest growth of any city in the world during that time.

📍 Dubai moved from 21st to 18th place on the list of the world's richest cities.

📍 London and Moscow are the only major cities that lost millionaires in the same ten years.

📍 New York still leads with 384,500 millionaires, but its number is flat while Dubai's keeps climbing.

📍 Dubai has 81,200 millionaires; 237 of them have more than $100 million and 20 are billionaires.

Growth like this does not happen by chance; it happens because a place makes three things easy: keeping money, moving money, and staying long term. Dubai gives zero personal income tax, zero capital gains tax, and residency tied to investment. That is a low-friction system for wealth.

Compare that to cities losing millionaires. Higher taxes and more rules push money out, slowly, without one single dramatic event. It looks stable until the numbers show otherwise.

Henley expects Dubai and Abu Dhabi to double their centi-millionaires again by 2035, so this is not a one-year trend, and the gap between rising and falling cities is only going to grow.

Wealth does not move for weather or skylines. It moves for certainty, and any city that wants this kind of growth has to compete on rules, not marketing.

What do you think caused this growth: policy, lifestyle, or something else?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 9

TAHIR MAJITHIA

youtube.com/shorts/SEn-lq972n...

Dubai’s real estate market is changing and understanding the numbers matters more than ever.

In this conversation, Andrew Cummings breaks down transaction trends, new project launches, buyer behaviour, luxury property demand, rental yields, and what investors should watch over the next few quarters. He also shares how he reads market signals beyond the headlines and where he sees opportunities across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, RAK and Sharjah.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

TAHIR MAJITHIA

Dubai developers make 25% margins. So a 20% discount on your apartment is mathematically fake.

I have seen in my 15 years of career, the buyer negotiates hard, lands a 15% "discount," and walks away feeling like they beat the developer.

They did not beat anyone, they were managed.

On my podcast, a developer broke down the actual economics of a normal JVC project. Here is what the cost really looks like:

📍 Land sits around 300 to 350 dirhams per square foot
📍 Construction runs close to 350 on built-up area
📍 Add consultants, the in-house team, sales and marketing
📍 Total cost lands between 1,000 and 1,150 per square foot
📍 The market sells around 1,350

So the margin is thin and listed developers like Emaar and Binghatti report net margins of 25% and above. At that level, where is a real 20% discount supposed to come from?

It comes from one place, the price was lifted first, then "cut" so you feel something.

Honest discounts exist on four or five percent on a bulk deal or a tougher product. That is real, anything beyond that is theatre, and the people who fall for it are the ones who never benchmarked the area before they walked in.

The investors who do well here are boring about it. They check fundamentals, study one micro-market deeply, and stop chasing the feeling of winning.

Because in this market, the discount is rarely the discount, it is the bait.

Have you ever walked from a deal because the discount looked too good to be real?

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 10

TAHIR MAJITHIA

Div Turakhia started coding at 8, hit billionaire status in his early 30s, and says the UAE built the frameworks that fueled his growth.

When he met Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, they didn't ask him about his success. They asked one question instead: what more can Dubai do to help you grow, and help the ecosystem around you grow too.

That's rare. Most governments wait for a founder to win first, then show up for the photo. Dubai shows up before you've proven anything at all.
He says winning at AI comes down to four things:

📍 Energy
📍 Compute
📍 Capital
📍 Political will

According to him, the UAE already has all four, and it moves faster than any other country trying to build the same thing. That's why he believes that in ten years, people will stop calling the UAE a regional AI player and start calling it a global one.

I see a smaller version of this every week with the clients I work with. Nobody moves to Dubai for the weather. They move here because the city keeps asking what they need next, instead of waiting to see what they can offer in return.

Most cities tax growth after it happens. Dubai funds it before it even starts. And once someone feels that kind of backing, Dubai stops being just a place to run a business from. It starts feeling like home for their family.

That's usually the exact moment they stop renting and start building something permanent here.

What made you trust Dubai enough to build something permanent here?

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 2

TAHIR MAJITHIA

Nearly 1.2 million rental contracts were signed in Dubai last year under a cheque payment system. It just got replaced.

For a long time, renting a home in Dubai worked the same way. Tenants had to pay their full year of rent upfront, using one to four post-dated cheques.

This meant that even if someone earned a good monthly salary, they still needed a large amount of money ready on the day they signed the lease.

Many people who could easily afford the monthly rent still could not manage this one big payment. Because of this, some tenants ended up choosing smaller homes, moving further away from the city, or simply not renting in Dubai at all.

In June 2026, the Dubai Land Department introduced a new system called Flexi Rent. It is being rolled out with 12 real estate companies, including Wasl and Deyaar.

Under this system, tenants can now pay their rent monthly, every three months, or every six months, instead of all at once. They can also pay using a debit or credit card.

The fee that used to apply for bounced cheques has been removed. Tenants are also being given grace periods for the first time.

📍 The real problem was never whether people could afford the rent. It was about when they had to pay it.

📍 As more people can rent today, more of them may decide to buy a home in Dubai over the next two to three years.

This change is often described as something done to help tenants. But it is really a way to bring more people into the housing market for the long term.

Do you think Flexi Rent will bring in more tenants, or just make paying easier for existing ones?

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 9

TAHIR MAJITHIA

Dubai wants culture to make up 5.4 per cent of its GDP, and Sheikh Hamdan just approved 40 ways to do it.

In first week of July, Dubai's Executive Council approved a Dhs18 billion package in a single sitting, covering culture, roads, population planning, and investor rules for the years leading up to 2033.

Sheikh Hamdan signed off on all of it himself.

Culture was just one line in that package. Here's what else was inside it:

📍 A 15km elevated corridor, part of the Al Khail Street Development Plan, running parallel to Sheikh Zayed Road, expected to cut peak-hour traffic by 51 per cent and add space for 9,000 more vehicles an hour.

📍 A real-time, AI-powered system to track Dubai's population, which reached 4.58 million by the end of 2025, up by 332,000 people from the year before.

📍 Dubai has approved a single Investor Register that will let a business operate across free zones and the mainland without registering again and again.

In Dubai, just announcing a road can push up demand nearby even if construction is years away.

This corridor touches Business Bay, Al Quoz, Al Barsha, and Meydan. Those four names just became worth watching, four years before a single lane opens.

Most cities wait for traffic to get bad, then react. Dubai is doing this four years before the road is even needed.

People keep comparing Dubai to their home country and calling it oil money or luck. It's neither. It's years of planning before the demand shows up.

If you're evaluating this market, don't just look at prices. Look at what's being built before you get there.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 6

TAHIR MAJITHIA

In 2020, people said Dubai was finished. The population never stopped climbing, and it just reached 4.58 million, growing 7.5% in one year.

While the population keeps climbing, people stay fixed on prices, and prices always catch up eventually, exactly what happened in 2020 and again in 2022, after analysts had already called the market over.

The order never changes: Population arrives first, demand builds over the next six to twelve months, and prices move only after, usually twelve to eighteen months later. I have tracked this through two full cycles, and it has not reversed once.

What makes this number harder to ignore is scale. 332,000 new residents in a single year is almost as many as live in all of Iceland, and each of them needs a home now, not eventually.

Supply is where the gap opens up:

📍 Around 77,500 new units are projected for Dubai in 2026

📍 Only 48 to 62 percent of projected units actually get delivered on schedule

📍 A record wave of residents is landing into a system that under-delivers by that margin, two years running

That gap has to close somewhere, and it closes through price, since it cannot close through units never built.

Many investors I speak with are still watching price charts, waiting for the signal to show up there. I watch population data instead, because by the time it shows up in prices, the best entry point is already gone.

None of this is a forecast built on sentiment. It is a count of people who have already arrived, measured against a supply pipeline with a habit of falling short.

Are you tracking today's prices, or where the population is already pointing?

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 2

TAHIR MAJITHIA

Villas in Dubai are up 12.5% this year while apartments are already slowing down, and few buyers know the difference.

Dubai real estate closed its strongest quarter ever last quarter, over AED 500 billion in sales, 22 straight quarters of growth. The headlines are calling it a comeback.

But look closer, and it's actually two different markets wearing one headline.

Villas are up around 12.5% year on year. Limited supply, families wanting space, global capital treating Dubai as a safe haven. That gap between villas and apartments only widened in the first quarter.

Apartments are still up on paper, but quarter on quarter, they've started to soften. That's where the risk sits, not in the city, in the asset type.

If you bought a generic one-bedroom to flip it in a year, you're not in the market the news is describing. That trade is dead.

Then there's supply.

This year, Dubai has 75,000 to 145,000 new homes scheduled to complete. That number alone makes people nervous. But only around 12,000 actually got delivered in the first quarter, against a plan of nearly 30,000.

Dubai handovers almost always run behind projection, every cycle I've tracked shows the same pattern.

So the risk isn't a citywide supply crash. It's a specific trade, a generic apartment in a high-handover pocket, bought on the assumption of a quick 20% gain at handover.

The real recovery is quieter than that. It's population growth, jobs, tourism, and Dubai's 2040 plan playing out over years, not quarters.

Buy where end users actually want to live. Not where the last cycle's speculators did.

Villa or apartment, which side of this market are you actually positioned in?

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 3

TAHIR MAJITHIA

The Dubai real estate market is changing and most people are looking at the wrong signals. 📈

From record-breaking luxury deals and changing buyer behavior to why the smartest investors are playing the long game, Andrew Cummings breaks down what's really happening behind the headlines.

🎙️ The full podcast is now live on YouTube. Watch the complete conversation and let us know your biggest takeaway.

#DubaiRealEstate #AndrewCummings #DubaiProperty #PropertyInvestment #Podcast

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1 month ago | [YT] | 6

TAHIR MAJITHIA

Watch the podcast now : https://youtu.be/51n8zUCKY5A

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Cummings, who heads the residential agency for Savills across the UAE.

We get into his unusual journey from UK government/counterterrorism work straight into Dubai real estate

• And then dive deep into the state of the market whether global capital is still flowing into the UAE

• Why ultra-wealthy buyers are paying millions in rent instead of buying

• What's really happening with supply and transaction numbers post-conflict, and where prime vs regular segments are moving differently.

•Andrew also breaks down his record-breaking 90M+ Tilal Al Ghaf sale, shares his honest take on branded residences, compares Dubai vs Abu Dhabi vs RAK vs Sharjah, and closes out with exactly where he'd deploy 50 million dirhams in today's market.

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 1