Why Lukas Kerrebijn, Co-Founder of RD Dubai, is Honest About the Dip, but Bullish on the Decade
Written by Emily Hart
Dubai's property market spent the first half of 2026 absorbing a shock rather than shrugging it off. Apartment values have slipped roughly 3 percent over the year, transaction volumes have fallen by about a quarter, and a rental market already easing under fresh supply softened further as international conflicts pressed on buyer sentiment. None of that is a collapse. All of it describes a market that has genuinely changed.
Much of the industry would prefer not to admit as much.
Instead, a reassuring narrative has taken hold, one citing rising construction costs and concluding there is never a wrong time to buy. While this is not baseless, it is not the whole story. Building costs were set to climb about 3 percent this year before the regional conflict pushed them higher, which makes a finished home cheaper to own than to rebuild and props up existing stock. What the pitch conveniently skips is the demand side, where the cooling is plain to see.
Lukas Kerrebijn, Co-Founder of RD Dubai, prefers to state it outright. Pretending the conflict left demand untouched is not persuasion, in his view. It is a fast way to lose an investor's confidence. He treats candor as the real advantage in a field full of operators selling their own inventory, on the logic that the advisor honest about the risks is the one worth trusting about the rewards.
That honesty does not dent his long-term conviction, which has not moved at all.
The reasons the UAE stood out before the conflict still stand: rental income and personal income go untaxed, yields hold near 7 percent, liquidity runs deep, and the market has clawed back higher ground after every prior blow, from 2008 to 2020 to earlier spells of regional strain. Kerrebijn has always treated property as a long game, and on that timescale the present wobble is a passing dent rather than a change of course. What follows in the near term is tactics layered onto that unchanged thesis, not a departure from it.
The tactics center on buying dislocation. RD has tilted toward distressed and off-market deals, targeting owners ready to accept less than fair value because they simply want out. Its own book shows the payoff: a Business Bay unit a developer first sold at 4.5 million dirhams was picked up by the firm for 2.65 million, nearly two million below that opening price, in an established Dubai area Kerrebijn already trusted. He has said he would have paid 3 or 3.2 million and still called it a win. Landing it far lower came down to relationships and negotiation.
Location is the discipline holding it together. Kerrebijn favors proven districts over areas still awaiting development, because established demand defends value through a downturn while fringe projects lean on a future a jittery market can defer. Beyond the core, he engages only where the price offsets the risk, and he treats location and entry price, not off-plan versus finished, as what actually decides a deal. The same instinct has pulled RD into an unusually active Abu Dhabi, where 2025 transaction values climbed sharply and the firm secured prime units in Sobha City, the developer's first master community in the emirate, at Al Bahiya.
Simply put, Kerrebijn is blunt about the near-term dip yet unmoved on his long-term view.
