I build in property, and I have built around it. The flagship is First Class. The rest is a record of where I have put capital and attention, including the places I chose to step back from.
Short-term rental management across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Ras Al Khaimah. It grew from a single apartment in 2020 to one of the highest-rated property operations in the region, on the back of systems rather than scale for its own sake.
First Class manages homes on behalf of owners and hosts them for guests from more than a hundred countries. It holds the highest review score of any host in the Middle East on Airbnb, and has run without a single compliance fine. None of that comes from charm. It comes from response times, cleaning reliability, pricing discipline, and fixing small things fast, run as an operation rather than a side income.
Founded in 2025 for clients who want the returns of this market without operating in it themselves. End to end: sourcing the right property, setting it up, and running it under First Class. The operating company and the investment company reinforce each other, one supplies the track record, the other the pipeline.
I am a founding board member of the Holiday Homes Business Group at Dubai Chambers, working with the regulator and other operators on how the short-term rental sector is governed. Building a company and helping shape the ground it stands on are the same job, done at two scales.
Before and alongside First Class I started ventures in food, fintech, and healthcare. Some worked, some I shut down deliberately to concentrate on the business with the best returns. Knowing when to stop is part of the discipline.
Ariana, Aroma of India, Joe's Chicken Tenders, Pasta Italiana, Tostada & Tartines, Super Salad, and Healthy Eats, run from a single kitchen across delivery platforms. A fast education in unit economics and operational complexity, wound down to focus on property.
A venture in the health space that taught me how regulated, trust-heavy businesses are built, and how different their rhythm is from hospitality.
Early exposure to the economics of moving money, and to how quickly a market with the wrong timing will tell you so.
The lesson across all of them was the same: attention is the scarcest input, and the discipline is spending it where the return is clearest.