Having been involved in the Internet and private equities business before setting up his own company together with some business partners, Ahmet Kahyan, CEO and co-founder of Reidin.com, first discovered that investment in real estate entailed a great deal of expense in obtaining business intelligence reports necessary to make sound business decisions.

"We started looking at real estate business intelligence and found out that we need to pay huge sums for such reports. Not just that, there was no reliable, trustworthy information available online, which one could subscribe to and get the database or risk analysis of countries worldwide. So we put up Reidin," Kahyan told The Business Weekly.

Unique products
Established two years ago, Reidin.com is an online business service that provides a range of intelligence products such as Dubai Focus and Rebis which are dedicated to meeting the requirements of real estate market professionals interested in developing economies.

"It is a first-of-its-kind company in an emerging country. Our headquarters is located here and we have offices in Hong Kong, Istanbul and London. We are expanding to Latin America," Kahyan said. "We chose Dubai as our global centre as it could help our expansion into India and China.

Our main business line is collecting data, analysing and selling it through the Internet."

"We also decided to base ourselves in Dubai because time-wise, this is the best location to be in. It has the fastest growing real estate market, a tax-free environment with great infrastructure.

The type of products that we are developing is of great need for the institutional and international investors and Dubai is a place that attracts huge Foreign Direct Investments (FDI)," Kahyan said.

Reidin.com's target market include fund managers, developers, property companies, asset managers, private equity companies, institutional investors, REITs, legal advisers, commercial real estate consultants and experts, stock market investors and analysts, governmental bodies, marketing executives, information professionals and sales people. Through the portal, subscribers can easily monitor and understand the latest news, market trends and business challenges relevant to them.

"We have a lot of consultancy clients for whom information is critical. For each client, we find out the information required," Kahyan explained. "We are the information people who make their business more efficient and more effective."

"We save them time, we save them money, and by using our database, they access the right information," Kahyan added.

Commenting on the growth of the client base and the type of subscription in Reidin that is made available to the market, Khayan said it was very positive. "We have different types of subscriptions and we have almost every single developer, investor and investment firm in this part of the world subscribed to our services," Kahyan said. "Our cash cow is Asia and Europe, particularly Hong Kong and London. We are also expanding into New York."

Flexible terms
"The subscription rate depends on the number of users and category or type of the client. On a monthly basis, it starts from $200 and goes up to $1,000 per user. But we are flexible in terms of creating value for our clients," Kahyan added.

Expressing optimism over business profitability, Kahyan explained that, "Globally, investible real estate asset class for international institutional investors is estimated to be slightly below $15 trillion in the emerging markets.

And we are the only company reporting on this $15 trillion asset class and providing information about it."

"We are just at the beginning. If you are asking how much money we are going to make, I don't know yet," Kahyan admitted. With regard to the Dubai Focus product, Kahyan revealed that the company has forged an exclusive partnership with the Dubai Land Department for possibly the next 15 years.

"The Dubai Land Department is our knowledge partner. They have the data which we make useful. We made it usable for people doing business in this part of the world," Khayan said. "We have a contract for 10 years and extendable for another five years."

Direct partnership
"It is a direct partnership both on the revenue side and marketing side. So it is convenient and beneficial for both parties," Kahyan said and stressed that portals other than Reidin.com cannot carry the information or data of the Dubai Land Department. Dubai Focus is a portal that shows all real estate deals and transactions in Dubai that are registered with the Dubai Land Department. It is updated daily and with a comprehensive database since 1973.

It not only serves as a detailed and up-to-date information source on real estate investment deals for the Dubai market, but also includes time-saving functionalities such as heat maps, graphing facilities and customised chart and analytical tools.

Elaborating on the Reidin-Dubai Land Department partnership, Kahyan said that the source of the data is the Dubai Land Department, whilst all the analytical tools, the search engine, design, maps and statistical systems are Reidin's.

"It is our own patented, copyrighted individual information. There was basic information from different servers of the Dubai Land Department. We worked with them for eight months to make such information readable, starting from 1973," Kahyan said.

Expansion plan
With regard to geographic expansion or introduction of a similar product as Dubai Focus, Kahyan revealed that the firm is currently looking at three major cities within the GCC. He however refused to identify these cities.

"They're coming up hopefully in a couple of months, but in the meantime, Dubai Focus is enough to keep us busy," Kahyan said. Talking briefly about their other product Rebis, Kahyan said that in this portal, subscribers can access information about projects in China, developers in Russia, retail malls in Turkey and compare them with different cities.

"You can see the tenants, yields and the analysis from CB Richard Ellis, Jones Lang LaSalle, Deutsche Bank and ING Real Estate. They are reputable and exclusive partners. Some of them are exclusive to us, and some of them provide us the data that they provide only to their client base. So we have a very mutually beneficial agreement with them," Khayan said.

By Albert Alba

© The Business Weekly 2008

 

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