Dubai family with US$10 billion fortune pivots to luxury property
The Al Ghurair group controls vast property portfolio across homes and commercial sites
[DUBAI] Dubai’s property boom has drawn in everyone from foreign developers to new local players. One of the city’s wealthiest clans is set to join them.
Sultan Al Ghurair, a scion of the wealthy family that built the emirate’s first modern mall, is setting up a real estate development firm to build on family land and sell homes ahead of construction. His first foray will be an ultra-luxury tower designed by a prominent Japanese architect.
The Al Ghurair group controls a vast real-estate empire that spans thousands of homes, offices, malls, warehouses and hotels and its patriarch Abdulla is among the richest men in the United Arab Emirates with a net worth of US$10.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But for decades, the family simply held on to assets and operated them, steering clear of the model of developing and selling new homes that enriched many in Dubai.
With his new venture, Sultan is diving into a market where prices have already soared more than 70 per cent since 2019, fuelling worries about a rising bubble risk. The 45-year-old brushes away those concerns.
“Dubai has taught us how to be creative in a very competitive market,” he said. “There will be buyers for everything if you create something unique. People are moving to Dubai and the city is becoming home for more and more people,” according to Sultan, who studied finance at Suffolk University in Massachusetts and is chief executive officer of Al Ghurair Development.
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Wealthy local families in the emirate could end up having a strong advantage because of their significant land holdings, said Taimur Khan, the head of research for the Middle East and Africa at the real estate firm JLL. By contrast, new developers will find it increasingly difficult to maintain historic profit margins due to surging land costs.
“Some of the trading families are now more actively looking to develop land banks built over decades at a time land values have seen very significant increases,” Khan said. In 2024, the total value of land sales increased about fivefold to 68.8 billion dirhams (S$24.3 billion), up from 13.7 billion dirhams in 2019, Khan estimates.
Dubai has lured dozens of foreign developers who came to the city in the past four years. Developers from Lithuania, Russia, India and many other markets have bought land. Yet many of these newcomers face sky-high costs for their purchases.
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Al Ghurair said his family has a “healthy land bank and we have ambitions to acquire more as well.”
The younger Al Ghurair said the company has other housing projects in the pipeline and while the debut project is geared to the wealthy, “the bigger demand is always in the middle,” he said. Future developments will be funded by a mix of off-plan sales and bank financing.
There are indications Dubai’s property market is stabilising and while prices are still growing, the rate of price increases has slowed amid buyer reluctance to pay more, JLL’s Khan said.
Abdulla Al Ghurair is one of Dubai’s most diversified billionaires with stakes in Mashreqbank PSC and stakes in a cement company, a construction firm that helped build the Burj Khalifa, food and water companies as well as large holdings of real estate.
The family built Dubai’s first modern mall, Al Ghurair Centre, which opened in 1981. It was Dubai’s first mixed-use development, including offices and homes along with a hotel.
Like many other Dubai developers, Al Ghurair’s first freehold development is trying to appeal to the richest of the new arrivals.
Wedyan, Arabic for Valley, will start with three-bedrooms the smallest of which will be at 6,500 square feet. It is the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma’s first building in Dubai and will also feature replicas of Japanese teahouses on balconies.
And fears of a possible correction aren’t deterring Sultan Al Ghurair.
“I think it’s a more mature market now compared to the past,” he said. “Probably this is what attracted us to enter to this market now.” BLOOMBERG
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