Exclusive interview with Rashed Hareb, Co-Founder and CEO of Rentify

Across your entrepreneurial journey, you’ve built businesses around consumer convenience and operational efficiency. How has that experience influenced your vision for the future of housing?

At its core, housing is one of the most important services people interact with, yet many rental experiences still rely on outdated systems, fragmented workflows and manual processes. Throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve consistently focused on removing friction from everyday experiences and housing is no exception.

I believe that the future of housing will be defined by intelligent infrastructure rather than isolated products. Residents shouldn’t have to navigate multiple platforms for payments, agreements, maintenance, communication and rewards. Instead, these experiences should work seamlessly together. The next generation of housing will be digital, proactive and resident-centric, creating more transparency and convenience while improving operational efficiency for landlords and property managers.

Rentify has described its latest platform as an AI-native rental infrastructure. How do you see AI transforming the residential experience over the next few years?

We are moving beyond a world where AI simply provides insights. The next phase is AI taking action.

Over the next few years, residents will increasingly experience housing that feels responsive and predictive. Rent payments, renewals, maintenance coordination, document management and communication will happen with far less manual effort. Instead of reacting to issues, systems will anticipate needs and resolve them before they become problems.

For property managers and landlords, AI will automate many of the repetitive operational tasks that consume time today. For residents, that means faster service, clearer communication and a more seamless rental experience. We see AI becoming the invisible layer that continuously optimises the rental journey while allowing people to focus on what matters most, which is enjoying their homes.

How do renting behaviours and tenant expectations in the GCC differ from those in more mature rental markets globally?

The GCC rental market is unique because it combines rapid urban growth, a highly mobile population and a strong demand for convenience. Many residents are expatriates who value flexibility, speed and digital-first experiences.

In more mature rental markets, consumers have already become accustomed to monthly rent payments, digital agreements and online management tools. In parts of the GCC, there is still

significant reliance on traditional processes such as post-dated cheques and fragmented communication channels.

At the same time, tenant expectations in the region are evolving rapidly. Today’s renters expect the same level of convenience they receive from banking, e-commerce, and mobility platforms. They want transparency, flexibility, instant access to information and mobile-first experiences. This creates a significant opportunity to modernise rental infrastructure and bring the residential experience in line with other digitally transformed industries.

Beyond simplifying payments, what does an intelligent rental ecosystem actually look like in practice for residents?

An intelligent rental ecosystem goes far beyond processing transactions.

For residents, it means having a single platform that understands their rental journey and actively supports it. Payments happen automatically, reminders arrive at the right time, receipts are generated instantly, and agreements are managed digitally. Residents can access support, track important milestones, earn rewards on everyday rental activity and receive personalised recommendations that improve their experience.

The goal is to eliminate administrative burden. Renting should not feel like managing paperwork. It should feel as seamless as using a modern financial platform. The intelligence sits in the background, simplifying complexity while giving residents greater control and visibility.

You recently described Earn AI as more than a property tool and closer to an operating system for rental real estate. What does that distinction mean, and how does it reflect the future of housing?

Most technology solutions in real estate solve individual problems. Earn AI was designed differently.

An operating system becomes the foundation through which multiple functions work together. Earn AI combines rental revenue management, payment intelligence, tenant behaviour analysis, renewal forecasting, occupancy insights and operational automation into a unified platform.

The distinction is important because the future of housing will not be powered by disconnected software products. It will be powered by integrated intelligence. By continuously learning from rental performance, tenant interactions and portfolio-level trends, Earn AI helps property managers and landlords make better decisions while automating execution.

Ultimately, we believe housing is evolving into a data-rich, continuously optimised ecosystem. Earn AI is designed to become the intelligence layer that powers that evolution.

Do you envision a future where property managers spend less time on administration and more time focusing on resident satisfaction, community engagement and experience design?

Absolutely.

Property managers entered the industry to create value, not to spend their days chasing payments, managing spreadsheets or handling repetitive administrative tasks. As AI takes over routine workflows such as collections, reminders, reconciliation, renewals and reporting, property teams will be able to focus on higher-value activities.

The most successful residential communities of the future will differentiate themselves through resident experience. Community building, engagement initiatives, personalised services and proactive support will become increasingly important.

Technology should not replace human relationships. It should strengthen them by removing operational burdens. Our vision is a future where AI handles the administration, while people focus on creating better places to live. That is where the next chapter of housing is headed.

Beyond the Mall, a new UAE-based online lifestyle marketplace, has launched with a mission to shine a spotlight on the region’s most inspiring independent brands, artisans and entrepreneurs. Bringing together a carefully curated collection of unique products spanning fashion, homeware, personalised creations, gifts and everyday lifestyle essentials, the platform offers consumers a destination to discover hidden gems while directly supporting local businesses and creative talent.

More than an e-commerce platform, Beyond the Mall is a community built around self-expression, individuality and entrepreneurship. Designed to connect shoppers with the stories behind the products they buy, the marketplace champions makers and founders whose passion, creativity and craftsmanship are often overlooked by traditional retail channels.

In a world increasingly dominated by mass-produced products and algorithm-driven shopping, Beyond the Mall is offering something different: a place where discovery, creativity and meaningful connections take centre stage.

Founded by British entrepreneurs Rhia Woodall and Phil Malem, the platform was inspired by a desire to make it easier for consumers to uncover exceptional local brands while giving independent business owners greater visibility and opportunities for growth. Every product featured on Beyond the Mall is carefully selected not only for its quality and originality, but for the story behind the person who created it.

“There are so many talented entrepreneurs and artisans across the UAE creating beautiful products, yet many remain difficult to discover,” said Rhia Woodall, Co-Founder of Beyond the Mall. “We created Beyond the Mall to make it easier for consumers to find and support these businesses.”

“Every product has a story behind it,” added Phil Malem, Co-Founder of Beyond the Mall. “Our goal is to help more people discover the incredible independent brands shaping the UAE’s retail landscape”

With plans to continuously expand its curated offering, Beyond the Mall aims to redefine how consumers in the UAE discover and connect with independent brands, one meaningful purchase at a time.

By Nurse SarahLouise, CEO & Founder of The Business Injection

People often ask me what the biggest lesson has been over fifteen years in this industry. They expect me to talk about marketing, or pricing, or scaling tactics and it isn’t any of those things.The biggest lesson I have learned is that you never build a business for the good days, in fact you build it for the days when life falls apart.

I started my own clinic from a back garden room, with a ten thousand pound personal loan, no investors, and no business background whatsoever. I was a single mother in the middle of a divorce at the time. I am telling you this because there have been moments in my own life where I could barely think straight, yet the business still had to serve patients, still had to support a team, and still had to generate revenue. Those moments taught me something that has shaped everything I have built since. The businesses that survive are not built by the most talented practitioners in the room, instead they are built by people who create something that does not depend on them being at one hundred percent every single day. That is the gap I see across this entire industry, and it is the real reason most aesthetic clinic owners never build a true business. They build a job instead, and they call it a business because it has a logo and a lease.

Clinical training teaches you to diagnose, treat, and deliver outstanding results. It teaches you nothing about cash flow, retention, team structure, or pricing that reflects actual value. I often describe this as an eighty-twenty problem. Clinical skill is roughly twenty percent of what a practitioner actually needs to succeed. The other eighty percent, the part nobody teaches in any training academy, is the operational backbone that determines whether a brilliant clinician ends up with a thriving brand or an exhausting job they built for themselves and cannot step away from. I see the same pattern constantly when practitioners attempt to scale, and it almost always comes down to three specific mistakes.

The first is confusing a full diary with a profitable business. I have sat across from clinic owners who are booked solid for months, exhausted, and barely breaking even, because nobody has ever taught them to look past revenue to what is actually left once costs, time, and their own labour are properly accounted for. Being fully booked feels like success. It is frequently the opposite, dressed up convincingly.

The second is scaling the treatment menu without ever scaling the experience. Practitioners add more services, more machines, more brands to their price list, believing variety is what grows a business. What actually grows a business is the experience a patient has from the moment they walk in to the moment they leave, and the relationship that experience builds. I have watched clinics with fewer treatments but a genuinely memorable patient journey consistently outperform clinics offering everything under the sun with no real identity behind any of it. Patients are no longer simply choosing a treatment. They are choosing the person and the brand behind it, and a clinic selling pure product with no experience attached to it is increasingly vulnerable to a competitor who understands that distinction.

The third, and the most damaging, is hiring and growing before any system exists for the practitioner to hire and grow into. I have seen owners bring on associates or expand into a second room with nothing documented, no consultation framework, no retention process, no consistent way of training a new team member, because everything that worked previously existed only in the owner’s head. The result is a business that cannot maintain its standards the moment the owner is not personally present, which means it has not actually scaled at all. It has simply multiplied the owner’s exhaustion.

The turning point, in my own business and in every clinic owner I have mentored since, comes down to one shift. It happens the moment an owner stops asking how to get busier and starts asking what would happen to this business if I disappeared for a month. That single question exposes everything a clinic has never built. No retention system. No documented process. No team capable of holding the standard without supervision. It is an uncomfortable question, and it is exactly the right one.

I built The Business Injection because I learned every one of these lessons the expensive way, with no mentor and no roadmap, and I do not believe any clinician should have to. The frameworks I now teach exist specifically to close that eighty percent gap, because clinical excellence alone was never going to be enough to build something that lasts.

The clinics that genuinely thrive over the next five years will not be the ones with the most treatments or the busiest diaries. They will be the ones who understood early that a business and a job are not the same thing, and who built accordingly. Anyone can build revenue for a while. Far fewer people build something resilient enough to survive the days when life asks for everything else.