Civil engineer, then broker. In that order.
Concrete before glass
I trained as a civil engineer in Russia and started on construction sites — the kind where a manager learns whether the person checking the rebar actually knows what they are looking at.
My first roles were unglamorous: foreman, site engineer, then site manager on commercial fit-out projects in Moscow. Most of the buildings I worked on were for international tenants — the people who fly in once a year, sign a lease, and expect everything to work for the next ten.
That period taught me a specific habit: read drawings as a contract, not a picture. Buildings lie a lot less than the people selling them.
Fourteen MEGA centres in fourteen years
From 2008 I joined the team building IKEA / MEGA shopping centres across Russia. Fourteen of them, in cities from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Kazan and Yekaterinburg.
These were not boutique projects. Each centre is hundreds of thousands of square metres, hundreds of contractors, dozens of disciplines, all timed against an opening date that does not move. You learn quickly that quality is decided in tiny moments — the bracket nobody inspected, the slope nobody resurveyed — long before they show up as someone's complaint.
I came out of that with a habit I cannot turn off: looking at any building and reading the corners first. Where two systems meet — that is where the cheap decisions live.
In Dubai, almost no broker has built anything
I moved to Dubai in late 2021 and spent the first months in rentals — Dubai Marina, JBR. That is where I noticed the pattern that decided my approach.
Most brokers here come from sales, not from building. They sell the rendering. They learn the script. They do not look at the curtain wall detail, they do not check what the developer used in the bathroom, they do not know which buildings will quietly become unrentable in five years.
I cannot pretend that does not bother me. So I built a different practice: pre-screen the building before I show you anything, walk you through what I see — including what is wrong — and only then decide together whether it is the right buy. The buyers who like that approach stay. The ones who want a salesman go elsewhere; that is fine.
What you can verify
- RERA BRN 50032 — registered with the Dubai Land Department, verifiable on the Dubai REST app. Looking up the BRN there shows the office I currently work under and the activities I am licensed for.
- Five years of Dubai transactions — completed deals across Dubai Marina, JBR, Palm, Bluewaters and the major secondary-market areas.
- Public-facing track record on Threads and YouTube — both linked at the bottom of every page.
If any of this resonates, the right next step is one message — not a presentation, not a pipeline, not a "let me send you our brochure".