Stake is a digital real estate investment platform, built to expand your global real estate portfolio in minutes. The company has leveraged their network and expertise to build up more than 20 years’ of experience as one of the leading real estate companies in Dubai and to source the best properties in their markets.
Tell Us A Bit About Yourself And The Platform That Is Stake?
A quick background on myself, my name is Rami and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Stake. I’ve been living in Dubai now for the last 20 years. All I’ve done is real estate, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I’ve worked for some of the early real estate developers here, growing sales and marketing teams.
I’ve always had a passion for real estate so after doing it for others for 16 years, I decided to branch out on my own. I launched Stake with my childhood best friend and our third co-founder Ricardo, who is our CTO and Head of Product.
Stake is a digital real estate investment platform that allows anyone from anywhere in the world to invest in Dubai real estate from an app in under 3 minutes. The way it works is you download the app, go through a KYC and then choose which property you want to invest in.
With Real Estate Being A Legacy Industry, Was It Difficult To Identify Challenges That You Wanted To Fix?
That’s actually what drove the business. Doing this for so long, you realise that there are a lot of inefficiencies and the way real estate is transacted. I saw it firsthand. First of all, we all know that real estate is the biggest asset class. There’s a huge affinity to it, especially in our part of the world.
It’s not as developed as other markets, so retail investors want to invest in it but it’s very inaccessible because it’s expensive. For non-resident investors, it’s very hard to get a mortgage. It’s also not as transparent. I would see that there was always a mismatch between what brokers wanted to achieve versus what investors wanted to do. Developers were also misaligned.
So how do you create an investment platform that allows people to participate in real estate affordably, transparently and digitally? Those were the three main problems that we were going for.
What Made You Choose Dubai For This Industry?
We’re based in Dubai and we know the market. For us to go into a market we didn’t understand, we wouldn’t have grown to the levels that we have here. There isn’t one city that’s transacted as much real estate in the last year than Dubai.
It’s actually done more transactions than New York, London or LA. So there is a huge demand. And one thing about the regulatory environment here is that it really enables you to grow as a business.
We really believe that now is the time to invest, and real estate is still very archaic. On our platform, we have over 205 nationalities from 170 countries. So we can onboard anyone from anywhere in the world, whereas other platforms that we have seen in other countries have restrictions to onboarding those international investors.
What Have Been Your Biggest Challenges So Far?
While regulation is quick, they’re not as quick as we are as a startup. Another challenge is talent. How do you find the best talent? A lot of people have come to Dubai in the last four years, so being able to attract global talent is easier than at other times. But finding the right people to join our team was always a challenge.
And then scale, how do you go fast in Dubai? We’re launching in Saudi Arabia, so how fast can you go? That’s always the thing with startups, maintaining that balance of growing but not in a way that’s destructive to the business.
What Has Been Your Biggest Success Technologically, From When You Started To Now?
The biggest success was finding Ricardo as a third co-founder from a tech and product perspective. My other co-founder Manad comes from a finance background. Both of us had no idea how to build an app. We just knew that we wanted to launch a real estate investment platform.
Bringing in Ricardo and his experience and letting him run with the building of the whole tech function and processes behind it has really enabled us to build a world-class product.
The Barrier To Entry With Stake Is Very Low, So What Have Been The Challenges With That?
The challenge with going to such a low barrier of entry is really making sure that your customer, your investor, knows exactly what they are getting themselves into. We want people to resonate with the brand, so we have something called Stake Academy. If you open the app, you’ll see educational videos throughout it to explain how to use the product.
Our wide spectrum of investors shows you that our product speaks to everyone. We recently got approval from the Dubai government to issue Golden Visas. So if you invest 2 million on our platform, you will get issued with one.
If You Could Name One Or Two Things That Has Contributed To Your Success, What Would They Be?
The first one is timing. Dubai has really been on the map and people want a piece of it. The second thing is our team, we’ve been very fortunate with having the best people from real estate to marketing to tech and sales. The people that are working with us have helped us get to where we are today.
What Does The Next 5-10 Years Look Like For You In An Ideal World?
We want to continue to grow our business here, and in Saudi Arabia as well. We believe there is massive potential and we want to be in other markets too. Definitely in 5-10 years we will be in more continents than just here. That’s definitely a goal of ours.
