Masood Al Awar is currently serving as the CEO of Medallion Associates. Mr. Al Awar has a long history of holding influential positions in the UAE. He has extensive experience in the fields of banking, real estate, and government. Masood Al Awar employed his creative solutions and innovative business acumen to improve and expand the companies he had worked for so far, driving them forward and creating new opportunities.
Masood Al Awar and his extensive experience in this field of real estate, banking, and government are invaluable to Medallion Associates. Medallion Associates is a real estate investment and advisory firm situated in the UAE with offices in Dubai, London, Kuala Lampur, and Karachi. The firm focuses on offering effective services to clients with a highly knowledgeable and skilled team under the leadership of Masood Al Awar. It also has a social media presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, &YouTube.
Let’s learn more about Masood Al Awar and his company through our interview below.
Explain the background of you and the company in detail.
I got my MBA degree from the University of Glamorgan in Wale, United Kingdom. I have held a wide range of executive positions, including Chief Executive Officer, Chief Sales, and Marketing Officer, Special Advisor to the Chairman, Head of Corporate Customer Relationship Management, and Chief Commercial Officer for UAE-based large listed Real Estate conglomerates such as Emaar, Dubai Properties, Sorouh Real Estate (ALDAR Properties NOW), Tasweek Real Estate both in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
I have worked in the banking sector with Barclay Bank for a period of seven years. During this time, I gained extensive experience in the financial industry, an experience that served me well in the following years. After working in the banking sector, I joined the Dubai Police as part of my governmental experience as the Head of Department within their General finance headquarters.
Following this, I have worked tirelessly in the UAE real estate industry. After acquiring some of the specific skills and knowledge that I have accumulated provides the company with a competitive advantage and allows Medallion Associates to serve the interests of its customers in the best possible manner.
Medallion Associates Limited is a real estate investment and advisory firm with a global business network headquartered in Dubai, UAE. The firm target exclusive real estate developments for investment and consulting opportunities in both the private and public sector.
What are your goals?
My main goal in life is to set ideologies that can inspire others and that can contribute to a better living world. For that, I continuously challenge myself and my team, looking at how to disrupt the consensus. I admire the risk takers and support the bold.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/company right now?
I am driven by an insatiable hunger for success and infallible confidence to follow my intuition even when it leads me off the well-worn path; I never allow others’ opinions to drawdown my convictions, and I never let the fear of failure or embarrassment guide my own decisions.
What was the path you/your company took to get to where you are today?
There are always many ways to fail big, but only a few to succeed. Success does not come with ease, and the path I choose for Medallion associates is filled with heart-breaking challenges, hardship, sacrifice, adversity, and commitment. I believe in a game-changing metaphor; if someone has to start, we must do it. Our path is to collaborate and create sustainable wealth for our stakeholders, country, partners, and other people, leveraging our know-how, networking, and track record to become our partner’s preferred option.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
I always stand for challenging the status quo, and the real estate industry in the UAE has been for the past 20 years through 2-3 cycles. Still, the fundamentals remained the same, an extremely fragmented sector with a meagre institutional footprint. The residential housing in the UAE is predominately at +99% Build-To-Sell oriented, and the commercial product at scale is scarce. So I decided to build a Real Estate investment company focused on building niche products with Institutional-approach and entrepreneurial execution to attract global institutional capital.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The biggest challenge is to change the thinking paradigm of local investors and the rule of the game for real estate. So convincing the big players in the real estate game to adopt the mindset to the new realities of the market and the looming untapped opportunities is the most difficult thing to overcome, especially when everything may seem to be working well, and they may need a dramatic example to shake them out of apathy. It may take a longer time, but we have decided to take a challenging path since we have the patience and the agility to achieve it.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Let me give you two words: Born Competitor or Action Man.
What makes you excited about Mondays?
I am excited every day and never had any preferred day. All my days, I have to contribute and influence others to make them happy one way or another – the family, work, and business, there are always actions that need to be taken. So it’s really 24 …7….365 ……. non-stop.
What do you value most about your culture and vision?
The core values at Medallion are accountability, professionalism, and inclusion. We encourage our employees’ opinions and support them in embracing catastrophic failure. We also empower them to take the credit for the successful initiatives, as long as they assume full responsibility for their flaws.
Tell us about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative.
Affordable housing is a project that requires innovation, especially with real estate in the UAE as an early starter where the cost of land is always expensive, and the profitability model becomes challenging unless you innovate and come up with a creative model on how to add core value in the long run.
The business model for the project requires a lot of giving up short-term profitability and long-term perspective with strong creative partnerships in a very dynamic competitive short-term playground marketplace.
What are your company’s strategies, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
Medallion Associates has assembled a large network of private investors, institutional investors, investment funds, and private offices. The relationships have been built and retained for many years. Our ability to access and directly approach our high-net-worth clients and partners reflects our power to market and promote real estate projects. Doing the business very differently from the rest will set us apart. We will be the future Hybrid REIT where the Idea is to be
What are the key values which helped you to overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership.
The values that I chose for the company are my built template, and I stick to them: Professionalism, Integrity, and Accountability, and Innovation, and with them is the courage to take risks and take all the hits without pain. There was this incident when my main advisors for a mega housing project decided to disregard and withdraw their support because numbers were not making the required profitability. Still, I could envisage the added value and continued to peruse, and it is one of the worthwhile projects we are working on right now.
How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
The company, in two years, should settle down for a listing on the financial market and should reap the benefit to all stakeholders who stood up with us and supported our business venture. And I should be able to bring a new asset class of real estate investment that matches the new generation of industry investors.
Where is your leadership going? What benefits do your clients get from your company in this competitive world?
Our leadership will create winners and rapid result owners that will be needed in today’s world. It’s not the big that eats the small but the fast that eats the slow, and with our competitive edge and track record, our clients and partners will always enjoy dominance.
What are your company’s services/solutions or products on par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services.
Medallion Associates LTD is a real estate investment and consultancy firm with a global business network and offices in Dubai, London, Kuala Lampur, and Karachi. Its advisory services arm includes asset management, enterprise development, and innovative investment structures covering geographically diversified investment areas with access to global investors through distribution. Medallion Associates’ strategy is to attract Institutional investors and start-ups linked to the property industry.
We strongly believe that the increasing deployment of next-generation technologies in commercial real estate, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, will change the industry’s landscape over the next decade. Let me say we will be the UBER of real estate that will change the sector dynamics Locally and globally.
Please feel free to contact me, If you have any further questions.
Connect with Masood Al Awar on LinekdIn.