Digital Desire How Tokenizing Luxury Can Lead to New Ownership Models

So it's very pleasure to have a conversation with you today and also me as investor we invest heavily in embodied intelligence and we are also invest a lot of frontline technology and as art collector I'm also the first donor of lof of Abu Dhabi and I'm a big fan of NFTTS and digital uh ownership. But today I'm here to learn from you. I'm very excited to learn from the young generation and how you reshape the property world. So Amira, can you introduce yourself and your platform and what you offer to investors?

Sure. Well, first of all, I'm happy to be here. It's been a phenomenal week here in Abu Dhabi Finance Week and an amazing crowd. So I'm thankful and grateful to be here. Uh I am Amamira Sajuani.

I'm the managing director at DAC properties. It is my father's company and we are the largest private property developers in the Middle East and Africa and top 10 largest private property developers in the world. And so I've been leading that company for the last you know five six years in terms of the sales marketing and development cycle. And I noticed the gaps in the market when it came to the liquidity of of purchasing a real estate and the entry into the asset class uh locally and globally. And so I started Pripco.

Pripco's goal is to fractionalize and tokenize real estate uh locally and then globally. We are licensed by two different entities. We're licensed by the DFSA and we were in a sandbox program with VAR where we actually tokenized properties. this summer. And so the goal for us is to be able to really allow fractional ownership into real estate and to break down that barrier of entry from, you know, the large down payments required to a mediocre $500 to enter into the asset class.

And also, you know, I'm from China. We are not very familiar, you know, in in China about a lot of blockchain and NFT and all of that. But when I came to Middle East, especially come to Abu Dhabi and also Dubai, it has been fascinating how the digital world especially in the blockchain in crypto and all this tokenization. So my second question to you is how do you see real estate tokenization reshaped property ownership in the Middle East and globally over next five years? I think real estate tokenization over the next five years will really reshape real estate as an asset class.

Real estate is already the largest asset class in the world. Allowing a much lower entry into the exposure of that asset class will allow a lot of liquidity that otherwise was not able to have access. And so Dubai has announced that you know by 2033 they would like 10% of the uh local transactions to be through fractional ownership which is almost 60 billion dirhams of transactions to happen on an annual basis through fractional ownership. Now when you look at that number the number seems high but when you go and compare it to the amount of liquidity that exists in today the equity markets the gold markets the crypto markets and other financial products it's actually a very small number and so we see it as fractional ownership will really transform the amount of liquidity that is able to enter into the real estate markets as well as over time it should be able to create products that allow easier ownership of full ownership. So what I mean by that is, you know, there are a lot of people who want to own a house, but they don't have the necessary down payment for a for a mortgage or they're not able to take a payment plan or they're not able to qualify because of, you know, being self-employed or having different brackets of income.

And so fractional ownership will allow for that access to whole units as well over time because when you're investing in fractional ownership, there's essentially no payment plan. There's no interest and you can start to rack up your share in a property slowly. You know, a lot of people what they do is the day their salary comes, they dedicate a certain amount to go into this investment. And so with time over the secondary market, you can buy your ownership into a full unit. it becomes a lease to own model that's very transparent very efficient and very easy to use and also now when I see I also buy properties in Abu Dhabi as we are FDI and we see the bloom real estate you know market here in Middle East what you see about the real estate growth at the moment in UAE

the real estate

as you know like a co- business of the real estate

yes of course the real estate growth in the UEE has been phenomenal I think the last 5 years has been the most growth any country in the world has seen in a real estate market globally over the last 100 years. Um you know a lot of people ask is it a bubble? Is it going to correct? The answer to that is very dependent on where you believe the country is going. The country has done a phenomenal job in terms of its vision, execution and its leadership and today I don't see any reason for the growth and prosperity that is coming into this region and into this country to slow down.

And so you see it when you go out, you see it in the roads, you see it in the restaurants, you see it in the malls. The population growth has been tremendous. And when the population grows, the the demand of homes is real. So we're not in an era where you know some people say what about the cycles and a good a good comparison is you know to say this cycle of bitcoin has been different because there's been institutional backing in the same sense the property growth demand in the region and in the country has come from a necessity of people moving into the country. Today we are the safest region in the world.

We are one of the highest most you know protected regions when it comes to a luxury lifestyle and this is a region that has opportunity. It has momentum and it has energy. And so this is something that you know we we benefit from from from other of you know things that happen in the world and we see that growth and so the the momentum will keep going as long as the country continues to grow and I think for everybody here for those of you who've been here for the finance weeks and the previous years you can see year on year how the growth has been immense. quality has been phenomenal and it's more and more people who are interested in coming to the UEE creating bases here creating headquarters and really flourishing the market.

Yeah. Yeah. I believe you because myself we we are FDI I'm two and a half years in Abu Dhabi and we opened a factory here. I'm now operating 100,000 square meter factories in Abu Dhabi and also we have lots of stuff from China we move here. So we are fascinating about Abu Dhabi and we like the policy here and I'm a big fan of Abu Dhabi and also you see the finance week there's a lot of people are here.

I said this this addition has been very large one out of last three. So

I I think as long as we have such phenomenal leadership continue to lead with such robust vision and execution there is nothing that will slow this market down.

Yeah. And we as a foreigner here we respect the leadership and we also inspire all the visions the leadership has and we are very happy to be here. And so my next question to you is that from the core real estate so how important is the regulator aligned with the tokenization asset? So is the government give you uh how can you ensure the investor the safety of the investment of the tokeniz is the government regulate here

that's a great question so you know a lot of people have been asking you know how come tokenization is something that's been around for so long and it's a global phenomena it's not something new or something that we invented over here and why has it not taken off globally what makes this different in this region and I think the very simple answer is the ability for the governments in this region to really innovate and participate with the private sector in creating something that is very unique and and and game-changing to any market and by that I mean that the regulators have been such an important cog in this machine and without them this would not be possible. So globally when you look at it some of the markets that have succeeded in such different kind of innovations and tokenization a market like Singapore has very robust regulations and regulators around it and so the UAE has definitely taken a far far step forward in that regard. The regulators are very important to ensure that the retail market is protected that the guidelines and rails that should be around a product like tokenization in any industry not just real estate are very robust in consumer protection. For us, we have experience because we are now dealing with two different regulators which are DFSA and VAR. And we see where the thinking comes from on on the things that you would not necessarily think of as a business, but where the regulators step in and make sure that the consumer protection exists.

And so if you're investing in a regulated entity in the UAE, at least I can speak for myself as a UAE regulated entity, the protections are so high that you would not fear for, you know, what has not been thought through in this in this business plan.

And what you see about tokenization not only in the real estate, how about in art, how about in fashion, how in our daily life? I think tokenization will become like AI in the next 5 to 10 years inevitable across every touch point of life. So you know when AI was first um was the buzzword a year and a half ago, two years ago, it was something that people were like yeah let's see how it goes. I think now it's very clear to the generic civilization that AI will take over a lot of aspects of life. A lot of different, you know, jobs will have to adapt to how they can use AI rather than allow AI to to to extinguish their jobs and how they can use it to better perform in different aspects of the industry.

And I think it's a time in humanity that will really dictate the next 50 years of where we are going and what kind of a world our children will live in. And I think tokenization is a big part of that. The next super cycle for the entire world in terms of an economy will be based on AI, tokenization, crypto in terms of the freedom of digital assets and the transfer of those you know equities and and and currencies on a crossber basis and so I think every industry will be exposed to tokenization at some point but I do believe that tokenization should only be used where it is actually a benefit and it is has a business use case of why consumer consmers require this because I think a lot of the global phenomena around tokenization is you know let's tokenize this but why are we tokenizing it because we can and that needs to be closely guarded in order to actually preserve the the uniqueness of why an asset needs to be tokenized and what is the benefit for both the business but also the consumer and so there's a lot of things that will come in in terms of DeFi lending you know onchain transactions the ability to have the digital currencies against tokenized assets and that will all be built out into in a in a governed regulated manner over the next 10 years

and also I think in art as art collector I see also there's a lot of platform and a lot of new companies come that to tokenization about art but in our generation we were not ready for that so now it's a new time for us also to learn and all of that

I think there's also you know a lot of emotional attachment to certain investments If you're an art collector and maybe you're not able to own a certain piece, it's a it's a moment of pride and emotion to be say to be able to say I own a piece of that collection.

And I think we have a very limited time. So what do you think about what is next of tokenization and what's the biggest operational and technology challenge to tokenizing real estate at a scale because you are one of the largest one of course. So I think one of the challenges when it comes to real estate tokenization is being able to have the right governance in place um which you know over here in this region the regulators are doing a great job with. But one of the probably um challenges that tokenization globally will face at scale is the ability to manage all of those properties because when you tokenize an asset somebody who is tokenizing that asset on your behalf has to manage that. And so when you go into having more than 10,000 assets under management, obviously that requires a totally different operational requirement and how do you automate and put technology and AI on that side of the internal efficiency to be able to really do that at scale and I think that will definitely grow with the business

and I think we still have one minute. So what what is the how can you make the profitable in your platform

in terms of the platform or the consumer?

Your platform.

So the platform obviously we are a platform that trades like every any other marketplace but for the consumer the benefit of buying a tokenized real estate is that you are given the dividend on a monthly basis. So the rental income of that asset is paid on a rent on a monthly basis pro rata to the share that you own and you are then exposed to the capital appreciation of that asset. So for anybody who really believes in the you know in Dubai or the UAE's property market and wants to be exposed to that upside while still having a capital dividend payout. It's a great asset class to be in. Today our net yields are still somewhere between 5 and a half to 7% which is still much higher than normal financial products and the normal market with today's interest rates.

I think uh I think we are in a new world and also because we invest in boded intelligence in China we say AI is the yesterday story. Today's EI so I'm waiting for the new things in the world and it's very nice to learn about you today. Thank you very much.

Oh thank you for having us today.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.