Anthon Garcia

In 2025, Dubai crossed a threshold: more than four million people now call the emirate home, a population that has grown nearly 15 percent since 2020. Home prices have kept pace with the influx, rising by roughly 50 percent in real terms over five years, the fastest of the 21 global cities tracked in UBS’s Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2025. That kind of run would worry economists almost anywhere else. In Dubai, it has become something closer to routine.

For most of real estate’s history, the biggest edge an investor could buy wasn’t more capital. It was access to better data, sharper models, and analysts who could turn both into a decision before anyone else. Institutions had all three. Everyone else had a broker’s word and a gut feeling.

One of the three shocks that broke private equity’s 2026 recovery originated close to home. The war in Iran and its attendant oil price spike arrived alongside an AI-driven rout in software valuations and stress in private credit markets to produce what Bain & Company, in its midyear report, calls a second consecutive “Groundhog Day”: recovery promised, recovery deferred. For global general partners, the story is about frozen dealmaking, stalled exits, and a fundraising grind.