MEA Challenges, opportunities, and innovation in GCC institutional real estate webinar

Overview

Join RICS Member Julien Romanet for a deep-dive into the GCC's institutional real estate market, currently defined by a $1.68 Trillion pipeline of planned and underway projects. This session will provide an investment perspective on the dynamic landscape shaped by sovereign wealth fund mandates, unprecedented capital influx, and the critical need for diversification.

The webinar will focus on the unique regional challenges - including the scarcity of large, stabilized, institutional-grade assets and issues with data transparency in markets like KSA, UAE, and Bahrain. Critically, we will quantify the returns and strategic fit of emerging sectors, featuring case studies on Saudi Arabia's $21 Billion commitment to Digital Infrastructure and the growth of e-commerce driven Logistics in Dubai.

We will also explore how innovation, such as fractional ownership and tokenization are addressing regional liquidity and scale issues.

Learning outcomes

• Identify high-growth opportunities.
• Evaluate the investment thesis for defensive, non-cyclical alternative real estate (healthcare & education ) and high-growth infrastructure - like assets (digital infrastructure & logistics,) including concrete examples of regional deals and projected returns.
• Analyze core investment challenges.
• Recognize the key hurdles for institutional deployment, specifically the scarcity of large-scale investable assets , the implications of data/valuation inconsistencies, and the impact of evolving multi-jurisdictional compliance across the GCC.
• Assess innovation as a solution.
• Explain how new financial structures, such as REITs, crowdfunding, and fractional ownership (tokenization,) are being adopted in the region to deploy capital efficiently.

Speaker