UAE startup wants to help Emirati women break into real estate

UAE startup wants to help Emirati women break into real estate

Baytuki, which means “Your Home” in Arabic, was in the making for two years before its launch last August. The brainchild of Latifa Bin Haider, the crowdfunding platform has received hundreds of applications since, each one vetted with due diligence.

Regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) and licensed under the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), Baytuki is enabling Emirati women to micro invest in real estate with as little as AED 5,000, reducing the barrier to entry. A short TikTok explainer video by the founder received 10,000 views and hundreds of shares within a few hours. Suffice to say, interest in the venture is high.

“What’s extremely heartening is that we’ve received interest from grandmothers as much as from granddaughters,” Bin Haider told Zawya. This, she added, was exactly what she had set out to achieve—assisting Emirati women irrespective of age or income.

The Best of Both Worlds

The Baytuki model stands at the intersection of traditional and modern principles of investing, taking inspiration from the traditional concept of the “Jam'iyah” system, where a group of people pool money for a certain period and one of them takes the pot home at the end of every month. The modern version derives from