UAE Rent Goes Monthly

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is the Morning Drive, PropTech now, or property technology, and the UAE rental market is embracing digital payments, giving tenants more flexibility, and also landlords greater control over their properties. Now, Dubai-based digital UAE rental and payment management platform, hope I've got that right, Keyper, recently raised $11 million in Series A funding, now has over 100 million dirhams in active annual rents paid monthly. And that is the word that stands out to me. Walid Shihabi is Keyper's co-founder, chief strategy officer, joins me in studio this morning. It's good to meet you.

Walid Shihabi (0:41)

Lovely meeting you too. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:43)

You know what, Walid, it's good to have you here, because I want to get to where rent payments, and I guess the UAE property market is headed. But first of all, talk me through your perspective on the traction, because that's really the word here, the monthly digital rental payments are actually gaining here.

Walid Shihabi (1:03)

Well, first, thank you so much for having me here, and thank you for giving a very good summary of sort of the problem we're trying to solve at Keyper. It's exactly that. We thought we'd focus on one of the biggest expenses any household in Dubai has currently. Around 87% of households in Dubai pay rent rather than a mortgage.

It is your single largest expense as a household in Dubai, by our estimate, represents over 30% of your total monthly spend or annual spend as a household, so the single largest sort of expense ticket. And it still, on the majority, is an extremely manual process, an extremely upfront cost process.

If you've been renting in Dubai, you know that you typically pay three, six, and sometimes 12 months of rent in advance, in pact with your security deposit, a rental commission to the agent that sorted your property. So it tends to be a very clunky and unrewarding experience with a significant upfront cash component. So it's a big problem. We believe that it's a problem that most people have. Most people would much rather pay their rent in digital monthly installments aligned with how they get paid. Most people are salaried, and they allocate a part of their salary for rental payments. So that in effect is what we enabled through technology, through adopting digital payment acceptance, through allowing people to spread that monthly payment without forcing the landlord to accept those 12 payments and allowing them to actually continue to receive those funds in advance. So effectively bridging the gap between the two.

SPEAKER_1 (2:53)

So things are going pretty well for you, Keyper. I mentioned the stats at the beginning. $11 million, that's about 40 million dirhams, Series A funding, you passed 100 million dirhams in active annual rents paid monthly.

Walid Shihabi (3:07)

As of Friday, that number is actually 125 million.

SPEAKER_1 (3:11)

Is it really?

Walid Shihabi (3:12)

Yeah, so that's just within the last month, month and a half, additional volumes. So it's an accelerating adoption, an accelerating acceptance for our solution.

SPEAKER_1 (3:23)

But that's more than accelerating, that's breaking the speed limit, isn't it?

Walid Shihabi (3:27)

We're very happy, literally. It's also partially the result of good partnerships that we have for distribution, of course.

SPEAKER_1 (3:35)

What does it tell us about changing retail habits, rental habits?

Walid Shihabi (3:39)

Well in effect, it changes the expectation of the tenant that finally they're having an experience that's more in line with everything else they do, which is digital, which is rewarded, which is easy.

And importantly, it's not just the splitting of the payment that we enable, but the whole experience of credit assessment, affordability assessment, it's all digital. That whole journey is digital. We use things that we already have in the UAE, such as open banking, open finance, Etihad Credit Bureau, but we sort of plug it into a fully digital experience. So you as a tenant have an easy way in which to qualify, enable monthly payments, and then use your favorite card, which gives you rewards prior to doing that. You never got rewards for that, the single largest payment today. You get those points from your card provider. You are able to manage digitally on an app, your payments. You can even defer payments over certain periods of time as they come due. So, just the convenience is much more like what you'd expect in Dubai today.

SPEAKER_1 (4:47)

No, let me back up for a moment. I mean, it's been generations, hasn't it, that the post-stated check has been, I mean, it's been king in the rental market. And to some extent, I mean, I guess it still is.

I can see that it's changing and it's accelerating, but how hard has it been for you to convince both tenants and landlords to break away from that? It's a mindset, isn't it? It's a very traditional UAE thinking.