Eighteen years in Dubai. A firm built on that.

Tshepo Maubane arrived in Dubai from South Africa in 2008, just before the global financial crisis reset the property market.

He began his career at one of the city's established brokerages, learning the business through a period when transaction volumes, values and confidence were all under pressure.

In 2011, he became the third person to join a young brokerage that would go on to become one of Dubai's larger independent firms.

Over the next twelve years, he helped build the business, later establishing and leading its commercial real estate practice. His work covered offices, retail, industrial property and development land, representing private investors, family offices and institutional clients from the GCC, Europe and Asia. He also led residential teams during part of that period.

In 2023, he founded Neo Realty.

Dubai is not short of estate agents. It is shorter on advice that can end with: do not buy this.

That is partly structural.

When a brokerage is paid only when a transaction completes, there is an obvious commercial incentive toward completion. Good brokers manage that conflict well. We thought it was worth designing a business that could go further.

Neo still earns brokerage commission. But where a client needs ongoing judgement rather than access to inventory, we can separate the advisory work from the transaction itself.

That matters particularly when the question is not simply which property should I buy? but does this acquisition improve the portfolio I already own?

The second principle is evidence.

Dubai produces an extraordinary amount of property data: registered transactions, service charges, development pipelines, delivery histories, rental performance and comparable sales. Much of it never reaches the client in a useful form.

We built the firm around reading it.

Two apartments in the same community, completed in the same year, can produce very different outcomes over a holding period.

The reason is rarely obvious from the brochure.

It may sit in the operator, service-charge trajectory, unit position, future supply, surrounding development, rental depth or eventual resale market.

So we start with evidence before impression.

Registered transactions before asking prices. Delivery history before renderings. Actual operating costs before projected returns. Existing and future supply before assumptions about scarcity.

Where the evidence is incomplete, we say so.

The same applies to the recommendation. The property available today is not automatically the property a client should buy.

We begin with the objective, test the opportunity against it, and proceed when the reasoning holds.

Sometimes that means negotiating harder. Sometimes it means looking elsewhere. Sometimes it means waiting.