Driven Properties has appointed Emre Okay as group chief financial officer, giving the Dubai real estate group a finance chief drawn from technology and private equity rather than from property.
Okay joins from Amazon, where he held several finance leadership roles, covering the European business from London before moving to Dubai to support the Middle East payments business. His remit there covered financial planning, strategic investments, operational optimisation and growth initiatives across business units in Europe and the Middle East. Earlier in his career he worked in mergers and acquisitions and investment banking at UBS in New York, followed by several years in large cap private equity investing across Europe and the Middle East. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and has more than fifteen years of international experience.
A group, not a brokerage
The scope of the role is wider than the Driven Properties name suggests. Okay oversees finance across the group platform, which includes the brokerage business, the development arm Lamar Holding, and Driven Property and Asset Management, and he leads fund investment decisions alongside financial strategy, governance and capital planning. The group reports roughly one billion dollars of co-invested assets, active gross development value of about 5.5 billion dollars through Lamar Holding, more than five thousand managed units in the United Arab Emirates, a 300 million dollar asset portfolio and more than fifteen minority venture investments.
Abdullah Alajaji, founder and chief executive, put the hire in the context of the group's stage rather than its size. "As we continue to grow and define our industry leadership position, we are strengthening the institutional capabilities that will define the next chapter of our growth," he said.
Institutionalisation is the stated job
Okay described the mandate in the same terms. "The next phase is about institutionalisation to build financial, operational, and technological infrastructure that allows growth to scale sustainably over the long-term," he said.
That is a precise description of the problem a Dubai property group of this shape usually has. A business that has grown quickly from brokerage into development, asset management and venture investing accumulates four different reporting cadences and four different definitions of return, and the constraint on raising third party capital is rarely the pipeline. It is whether the numbers can be presented to an institutional investor without qualification. Hiring a chief financial officer whose experience is in technology finance, investment banking and private equity rather than in real estate development is consistent with that reading: the gap being filled is capital markets credibility, not construction cost control.
