Dubizzle Group's Haider Ali Khan Answers Your Questions from PPW Madrid

"Everything's on Dubizzle, so everybody uses it for one reason or another."

It's a good starting point for an interview with Haider Ali Khan, and it's what makes it one of the most influential generalised marketplaces in the MENA region.

Dubizzle Group, through its flagship platforms dubizzle and Bayut, is a household name in the UAE, connecting individual and business sellers with prospective buyers across key verticals, particularly real estate and automotive. Dubizzle is a broad classifieds marketplace spanning property, autos, and general classifieds, while Bayut is a specialised, dedicated real estate platform; together they form a powerful, entrenched digital ecosystem. This combination underpins the Group’s position as the distinct number one in the attractive two-player UAE real estate classifieds market and the clear leader in UAE autos, making Dubizzle Group the primary choice for property agencies, car dealerships, and consumers.

It's a bit of a shame, then, that this interview isn't being released in tandem with news of a "from Zero to IPO" headline.

The unusual timeline surrounding this interview is that Dubizzle Group reluctantly postponed its flotation less than a week after I interviewed Dubizzle CEO Haider Ali Khan at the Proptech and Portal Watch conference in October (pictured).

Just ten minutes before our conversation, Ali Khan was on stage discussing Dubizzle's product and tech developments to a room of 400 proptech enthusiasts. Such was the popularity of his talk that his Q&A session left a handful of questions unanswered, which Haider kindly agreed to respond to on the record.

We quickly scan the outstanding questions, and a handful are struck from the record. "No comments" about the (at the time ongoing) proposed IPO, and no details about revenue splits or other pricing strategies. Fair enough.

We move on to a delegate's question about deploying a 600-person team across multiple verticals and countries. Firstly, Ali Khan explained the difference between user behaviours on (the housing-focused vertical) Bayut and (the generalised horizontal marketplace) Dubizzle:

"The journey starts a lot earlier on the general marketplace, Dubizzle. Everything's on Dubizzle, so everybody uses it for one reason or another. It's very sticky. We also have what we call a spillover effect, where somebody begins a search in one vertical and ends up on another, and so on. It's pretty fascinating. Imagine if you're in the baby's items category—a life-changing event. You're going to welcome a new child into the family, so maybe it is a good time to move house. We see this on Dubizzle. On the other hand, people who want more detailed information about what's happening in the real estate market will go to the vertical (Bayut), especially when the transaction is involved. They're fairly different use cases."

The company's valuation tool, built on more than half a dozen machine learning models, was also a topic from the Q&A. Dubizzle's AVM, found exclusively on Bayut.com, can now spit out a valuation for a property that the team believes is closely tied to a real, achievable on-market price, roughly 94% or 95% of the time. The penetration of the product has been very high; in May 2025, 50% of the Ready Sale properties transacted in Dubai had a TruEstimate report generated for them.

What is Dubizzle's advice for creating a super-accurate valuation tool? Ali Khan suggests that data cleaning and acquisitions have helped.

"It really comes down to how clean your data is, because that's what you're working off. We've heavily invested in the data side to make sure our data remains super clean. We've also acquired Property Monitor, which further solidifies our position as having a very clean data lake. We feel our data, and by extension the AVM, is pretty accurate."

Bayut's TruBroker program is a truly gameified initiative, rewarding brokers with 'TruPoints' and then ranking them according to their application of professional standards. Ali Khan believes the competitive nature of the TruBrokers is an overwhelmingly positive thing for brokers and consumers alike.

"If you, Harvey, are number one in an area, and I'm number two, what do I have to do to beat you? I have to work harder. And if I work harder and become number one, you become number two. So now you have to work harder, and Bayut will continue to reward both of us for our commitment to professional standards. The biggest reward for brokers is the increased visibility they gain on the platform, as this can translate into substantial earnings. If you sell one property, you're going to make a lot of money."

It's a fantastic way to keep Bayut sticky, but there's also a much more holistic process behind the program. It's not just about points and prizes, it's about livelihoods and rising tides. The question is, how does this system work on a granular level? Where's the quality control?

"TruBroker is a good use case for having a strong data team and machine learning. We spend a significant amount of effort and time identifying the right kind of brokers to move up the chain, and it's a feedback loop that we can continually improve. Right now, we're focused on finding the right actions to earn more TruPoints. We're really trying to move the whole industry level up, and it's doing a wonderful job."

Finally, Ali Khan shares a story about his studies in the United States, where one realtor in particular had essentially monopolised her local market by focusing all her efforts on a micro-community level. Any time you saw a For Sale sign in a five-block radius, it was the same realtor, the same tagline, the same phone number. The result was an agent who had a great career doing one thing really well, solely because her focus was so microscopic.

He argues that chasing vanity metrics across major areas like Mumbai, Melbourne, or Michigan is a fool's errand. Dubizzle says its TruBroker initiative isn't about being the best agent in the world; it's about allowing individual operators to carve out a niche for their brand and their career.

"How do you even measure the 'best agent in India'? What does that even mean? You don't have to be an expert in the country or even a city. We'd much rather have brokers who are experts at the subcommunity level, who breathe it, who live it."