I work with individuals landing here, with enterprises placing hundreds, and with the real estate and hospitality groups building the supply. Deep market network, seventeen years of context, and the AI and automation stack behind it.
Compound, neighbourhood, school, clinic, network. High-touch, one at a time, from the first call to the first ninety days. The kind of landing where the details matter and the decisions are hard to reverse.
HR teams, Vision 2030 entities, multinational headquarters. Bulk housing programmes across compound, apartment, and staff accommodation stock. Sourcing, contracting, and ongoing operations, delivered as a managed programme rather than a set of transactions.
Compound operators, developers, and hotel groups navigating the residential category as it institutionalises. Positioning, operating model, capital structure, foreign LP conversations. The paper below is the framework I use.
A thirteen-page framework for institutional capital allocators evaluating Saudi residential. The parallel to US multifamily in the mid-1980s, the two talent flows running through Riyadh, the compound stock as the wedge, and the operator constraint that is currently being resolved.
Capital is plentiful. Supply is plentiful. Demand is plentiful. The constraint is the operator.
The conversation to have now is the relationship. The capital deployment is twenty-four months out.
An hour with Carly Overman and Vesna Petrovic on the 2009 arrival, the Facebook message that changed the summer, flynas through the Arab Spring, and what actually goes wrong when families land in Riyadh without a plan.
Expo 2030, Vision 2030, and the current chapter. Why the world will come to learn from Saudi Arabia.
Progress you fund yourself is the strongest signal in a market where nobody moves on your timeline. Why a bootstrapped plan beats a fundraising plan for Saudi market entry, and how the mechanism actually works.
Saudis returning from London, Miami and Chicago are the underpriced demand driver in Riyadh residential. Why the returning diaspora, not the expat influx, is the structural story institutional capital should be underwriting.
The junior operator's edge in an emerging market is knowing which proven playbooks have not arrived yet. What running Google Ads and SQL queries at a Saudi airline in 2009 taught me about where careers compound.
Confusing Saudi hospitality with commercial traction is the most expensive misread a foreign founder or investor makes. How to tell the difference, and what to do about the timeline nobody will run on yours.
Saudi residential is at the moment US single-family rentals reached a decade ago. The compounds were the proof of concept all along. What institutional capital should read into the convergence now underway in Riyadh.
For twenty years, building a software-enabled business needed a technical team. That constraint has dropped. The next decade belongs to the operator who can now build.
Companies panic in month fourteen when the board asks for numbers and wind down by month twenty-four. The operators who stayed hit their inflection in month thirty.
The tax and government-contract frame is well understood. What companies underestimate is the cost of running an RHQ credibly rather than nominally.
Access and traction are different things in this market. This is what foreign operators actually do about the gap between them.
The operating checklist that patience looks like in weeks one through thirteen of a foreign entry.
The star candidate from London is usually the two-year misfire. Sequencing decides whether the entry works.
The variable that determines who thrives past year two is not the compound, the school, or the package.
In 2011 I was running revenue management for flynas when the Arab Spring began. It is still the most useful education I have received.
The most common mistake when relocating to Riyadh is a sequencing mistake. What to do in your first three months, and what not to sign.
Making friends in Riyadh and building a social life comes down to one thing. What seventeen years on the ground taught me.
Google told me not to come to Saudi Arabia in 2009. It was wrong about almost everything. What expat life in Riyadh actually looks like.
Three patterns that break foreign operators in year one. Access versus traction, the hiring trap, and why month fourteen is when most people quit too early.
Why a fractional executive in Riyadh costs more than the equivalent in London. The structural reasons nobody discusses openly.
Four communities. Close to a thousand households. The honest account of what building residential infrastructure in Riyadh actually required.
New notes every couple of weeks. The market entry cluster of five notes shipped in September and October 2026.
Email or LinkedIn. I read everything and reply within a few days to the things I can usefully help with.