Better Homes

Real Estate in the UAE

By Fadwa Eraky on May 3, 2018 in People

Better Homes LLC in the United Arab Emirates takes pride in seeing things just a little sooner than almost everybody else.

Linda Mahoney formed the company in 1986 after noticing the lack of professional real estate companies in Dubai, the country’s largest city.  Since then, she and her team have dedicated themselves to understanding their markets inside out, eventually growing Better Homes into the UAE’s leading real estate company.  Better Homes’ services include residential sales and leasing, commercial sales and leasing, property management, and holiday homes.  The company has offices in Oman, Jordan and Qatar in addition to branch offices across the UAE.

Launched as a rental agency, Better Homes opened a sales division in 2002 that has served tens of thousands of buyers and sellers.  Another division created in 2015 organizes and promotes off-plan projects—properties without structures—in Dubai.

Better Homes expanded from one woman working from a desk in a dining room to almost 500 employees staffing offices across the UAE.  It preceded the Burj Khafila, the Burj Al Arab, the Marina, and other landmarks of Dubai’s stunning real estate development.  This expansion arose from a business model that emphasized reliability, convenience, and visibility supported by a website that welcomes 24,000 page visits per day.

“Every day, we look for ways to bring new and better services to our clients and maintain our market position,” says Ryan Mahoney, CEO at Better Homes.  “The key for us has always been finding places for people to live.  Our business is really quite simple: people and their homes.  We do much more than that, of course, but people and their homes will always be at the heart of what we do.”

Using the latest and most advanced property management technology is one way Better Homes executes its business with the desired level of personal service.  Client service and internal efficiency were the principal factors that led Better Homes to adopt Yardi Voyager as its property management platform in 2014.

“With our company growing across multiple verticals in the UAE, we needed a way to get an overview of the portfolio at one glance,” says Zubin Firozi, Director of Operations at Better Homes.

“By housing financial and operational data in one place, Voyager gives us a full-business platform that covers all aspects of lease administration for every market we serve.  Voyager delivers simple and understandable reports, electronic receipts and service that’s customized to each client’s unique requirements.  Our staff spends less time on data entry and administrative tasks and more time managing our properties effectively—and finding homes for people.  From an internal standpoint, Voyager makes data easily accessible to employees and saves money by reducing our reliance on paper.”

Firozi applies more than 12 years of experience, five of them with Better Homes, to helping clients buy, rent or sell property.  In his earlier role as head of property management, he oversaw an 80-member team that managed residential and commercial properties.  Previous positions in business development and leasing management provided additional skills that help him back up founder Mahoney’s assertion that Better Homes is “the Middle East’s most trustworthy and dependable property agency.”

“Real estate is all about the human connection.  We constantly look for ways to offer new and better services to our clients.  As a key collaborator and one of the world’s Top 100 private cloud companies as ranked by Forbes, Yardi helps us do that,” Firozi says.

Learn more about Better Homes. This article previously appeared in Arabian Business.