The long game: Amirans Kavtaradze has built a multibillion-dirham business by refusing the easy sale
Amirans Kavtaradze founded Alcenza Properties on the premise that buying property is often only the first step in relocating to the UAE. He explains why the company combines brokerage with business and relocation services, how it uses AI behind the scenes, and where he sees opportunity and risk in Dubai’s maturing property market.
12 August, 2026
TT
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Most founders enter a new market from the top. Amirans Kavtaradze walked in through the front door and started selling. He had run his own real estate companies in Europe, a career begun in Latvia in 2008 and continued in London, and every reason to arrive in Dubai as a chief executive. Instead, in 2022, he took a job as a broker at one of the city’s large agencies.
“I deliberately started on the front line,” he says. “Within two years I knew exactly how this market works: what investors actually need, which projects perform and, most importantly, what was missing.” His conclusion: Dubai did not need another brokerage. “What was missing was never brokers; Dubai has thousands. It was a company that owns the client’s entire journey.”
“A person entering the UAE isn’t just buying an apartment; they’re often relocating a life: opening a business here, moving an existing one, bringing the family, finding schools for the kids, arranging residency and banking.” The market, he says, “forced them to assemble all of that alone, piece by piece, across companies that never talked to each other.”
So, Alcenza Properties, his own agency, had a different premise from day one: give the investor the full cycle in one place.
The inversion
The conventional reading is that a successful brokerage later diversified. Kavtaradze says that reverses the sequence.
“People assume the ecosystem came later, as an add-on to a successful brokerage. The truth is the opposite: the ecosystem was the founding idea, and brokerage was the right place to start, because handling the largest purchase of someone’s life is where trust is earned.” Alcenza Business Services, he says, “simply gave that idea its own home.” Alcenza Properties proved itself fast. “In our first year we were already among the top 10 partners of developers like Emaar and Nakheel.”
Scaling judgment, not revenue
Ask what has been hardest about growing quickly and he names none of the usual suspects. “The hardest thing to scale isn’t revenue; it’s judgment. The barrier to entry in Dubai brokerage is low; the barrier to consistency is enormous.”
His diagnosis is unusually blunt for a chief executive on the record. “Most of the competition here isn’t really between companies; it’s between hungry agents fighting for money today. No strategy, no thought about tomorrow: push whatever project pays the highest commission, collect, move on.” The consequence is visible in the resale market: “You see buyers who bought into certain projects and now can’t resell them, or exit at a painful loss. The client ends up paying the price for the agent’s hunger.”
Alcenza Properties’ counter-position is a constraint it imposes on itself: it will not sell an illiquid project for a higher commission. “A client should come to us once and stay for life. That means defending only their interests,” he says. “What matters is location, location and location again, and the client’s actual goal: a home for the family or an investment with a clear exit. A genuinely happy client comes back tomorrow, brings a friend, and works with you for years. That philosophy, more than anything, is what separates us in this market.”
Institutionalising that is harder, and he treats it as an operational problem, not a values statement. The company hires for character before track record, trains agents to advise rather than push, and uses AI to strip away the administrative routine so agents’ hours go to clients. Success is measured on repeat business and referrals, “the only honest test of the philosophy.” The external scorecard is the developers. “Developers see everything: when Emaar places us among its top partners, and Meraas and Nakheel rank us in their top five, I read it as evidence that our standards survived our growth.” Then he refuses the tidy ending: “That challenge never ends, and it shouldn’t.”
The contrarian on AI
Kavtaradze departs most sharply from the proptech consensus on what AI should be allowed to touch. The fashionable investment is AI-powered lead qualification: bots screening prospects before a human gets involved.
Alcenza Properties has refused to build it. “People buy from people,” he says. “A property purchase is one of the most emotional decisions a person ever makes: there’s excitement, there’s fear, there’s a family behind it. A great agent reads all of that in the first two minutes and adapts. No algorithm does that. AI can process language, but it can’t feel the moment, and it can’t build the trust that closes a seven-figure deal.”
The objection is also commercial. “Part of your audience doesn’t notice, and a large part is turned off instantly; AI qualification calls have become the new spam.” Meanwhile, competition for attention in the UAE keeps driving up the cost of every lead.
He concedes one exception. When leads arrive faster than a team can answer, “a robot beats a lead that sits untouched until everyone forgets it existed. But that’s triage, not a sales strategy.”
The bigger risk is invisible. “A machine filters people out at its own discretion, and these models carry a known error rate, filling gaps with assumptions that aren’t grounded in fact. Every such mistake is a paying client silently deleted from your pipeline.”
So Alcenza Properties points the technology the other way. “AI belongs behind the agent, multiplying their capacity. Not between the agent and the client, killing the relationship before it starts.”
Building the machine behind the agent
That principle is now a product. Alcenza is building its own ecosystem inside its CRM, built around AI, “not features for a demo, but tools agents actually need every day.”
Start with listings, the industry’s hidden tax. “On most platforms, getting a live listing onto the portals is heavy work: documents collected by hand, forms, checks, formatting.”
So the company built its own publication system. It verifies documents automatically, matching the data inside them against the listing fields, turns quick photos shot on an agent’s phone into professional images, and generates the title and description. “The agent ticks a few fields, and the listing cross-publishes from our CRM to all the major portals and across our partner and project sites.”
The same logic runs through the rest of the agent’s day. When a lead arrives, the agent gets an instant WhatsApp notification with the project information already assembled. “All that’s left is to pick up the phone and talk to the client.”
The pipeline maintains itself. “Nobody has to live inside the CRM: the system recognises the actions an agent has taken with a client and updates the pipeline automatically.” A working day of data entry becomes 10 to 20 minutes of review and comments. Internal chat assistants answer agents’ questions and retrieve information on demand.
Notice what is deliberately absent. Nothing in the stack talks to a customer. AI verifies documents, writes listing copy, files data and routes information, all upstream of the conversation, never inside it. Where it does touch the top of the funnel, it is narrow by design: filtering spam and verifying suspicious contacts, “so they never eat an agent’s time.” Below that, it automates the routine that fills an agent’s day: listings, documents, follow-ups, reporting.
“Every tool exists to return time to the conversation with the client. Free an agent from routine, and the same agent properly handles far more leads, and a human talking to a human converts far more often than any bot ever will.” Technology claims are usually unfalsifiable, because growth has many causes. So he offers the cleanest natural experiment his business has produced. “We spent about a year working toward a target number of live listings. After these tools went live, we doubled that number in less than three months. Same team, same market, same standards; the only thing that changed was the technology.”
He does not overclaim. “Growth always has many parents, and I’d never deny what recruitment and training contribute. But when you see a step change like that with the same people, you know what caused it.” The rule is short: “If we can’t measure a tool’s effect, we don’t scale it.”
Reading a maturing market
His read on the market is neither promotional nor bearish. “Every property market in the world is cyclical, and the UAE is no exception. This market has been through several crises, and every time the recovery carried it to a higher level than before.” That is the context for the current numbers: nearly eighty thousand transactions worth roughly Dhs286bn in the first half of 2026, “after the boom of 2021–2024, not during it. That isn’t speculation anymore; that’s structure.”
Composition matters more than the total. “The clearest sign of maturity is who is buying, and why. A few years ago off-plan dominated, and much of it was bought to flip. Today the focus is shifting toward ready homes, because people aren’t just parking capital here; they’re moving here. More demand comes from people buying a home to live in, and that end-user base is exactly what makes a market stable.”
Then the argument he thinks international investors still underestimate.
That gap, he says, is why close to 10,000 millionaires relocate to the UAE every year, more than to any other country, “and why business follows: the Emirates are investing heavily in AI and turning themselves into a global platform for technology companies and startups. For the next decade, this is where people will come to build a business and raise a family.”
Turn to the next two to three years, and he gets specific. The opportunities, as he sees them, are “prime and waterfront locations with genuinely constrained supply; branded residences; communities where end-user demand outruns supply; and the corridors around Dubai South and the Al Maktoum airport expansion.” The risks are as clearly drawn: “a heavy supply pipeline through 2027 in specific segments, and off-plan bought purely to flip, with no underwriting of the developer, the location or the exit.”
His verdict splits the difference. “I don’t expect a crash, but returns will diverge sharply between good assets and average ones. The era of buying anything and watching it double is
over; the era of buying the right asset, with the right advice, is just beginning.”
The second engine
“Relocating to a new country is always stressful,” Kavtaradze says. “Unfamiliar laws, procedures, paperwork; even registering the property you’ve just bought can feel overwhelming.” Most Alcenza Properties’ customers are international, and for them the purchase is an entry point, not an endpoint: residency, “often the Golden Visa their property already qualifies them for”, a bank account, a company licence, the relocation of a business, schools for the children. “We watched clients complete a flawless purchase with us and then walk alone into a fragmented, opaque services market. That’s the gap this company was created to close.”
The proposition is deliberately unglamorous. “Come, choose, buy, and relax. We’ll open the bank account, handle the visa, transfer the business, even place the kids in kindergarten and school, and anyone who has faced Dubai’s school waitlists knows what kind of headache we’re removing. The client shouldn’t have to worry about a single step twice: we organise it, we process it, it gets done.”
The flow runs both ways. “You don’t need to buy property to come to us; many arrive first to open a company. But we know how that story continues: today he sets up a business, tomorrow he buys an apartment or an office with us, later he expands, rents or sells.”
“We don’t chase profit here and now. We’re built for relationships that last, where every single request gets handled, and the client has a reason to stay with us for decades.” The strategic reading is sharper than the service list suggests: “Dubai’s growth story isn’t really about property; it’s about people moving their lives and businesses here. Property is just the most visible part of that move.”
Building for 2033
Is the ambition a full-service platform for investors entering the UAE rather than a brokerage? “Yes, that’s precisely the ambition, and everything we see confirms the timing.”
“Over the next five years, the UAE will be the country people actively move to, and that’s not just my optimism, it’s the government’s published strategy.” He lists them: D33, aiming to double the economy by 2033 and place Dubai among the world’s top three cities to live, work and do business in; the 2040 Urban Master Plan, building for a population approaching six million; and the Land Department’s target of a trillion dirhams in transactions and 33 per cent homeownership by 2033.
“Dubai is building the city of the future openly, on a published schedule, and it has a habit of beating its own deadlines. When a city publishes plans like that, you align your own growth with them.”
Demand is already running ahead of it. “There’s product for every taste, yet commercial occupancy sits at 95 per cent and higher; in prime districts there’s simply no space left; business is outgrowing the city.” The country, he adds, will welcome more newcomers every year.
Three things sit on the roadmap.
1. International reach. Expanding the office network and international representation, “bringing the UAE closer to the markets our clients come from.”
2. Tokenisation. A dedicated service, built on regulation already in place: “the Land Department has launched tokenised title deeds, and the secondary market is live.” His interest is in who it admits: “Tokenisation will open this market to investors entering with smaller capital, letting them hold a share of UAE real estate and earn from it.”
3. Exclusives. “Several projects are already under our exclusive management, which lets us control quality end-to-end: the property, the transaction, and every service around it, from company formation to handover. The more of the chain we control, the more we can personally answer for the result.”
The finished product is an experience, not a service list. “You don’t worry about a thing. We start the entire process remotely: the selection, the structuring, the residency, the company, the schools, so you fly in at the last moment, when it’s all ready. One decision, one team, zero stress.”
The internal design mirrors it. “We’ll keep building the company the same way: so that both clients and agents feel it was made for them. When agents aren’t buried in routine, they understand the client better, and the client feels it. I want Alcenza Properties to be as comfortable and modern as Dubai itself.”
Kavtaradze has a phrase for what he wants the company to become: “The first call a person makes when they decide the UAE is their future, and the last partner they ever need to replace.”
