Mahdi Amjad

Every project Mahdi Amjad has ever approved began with the same quiet question: what impact will this leave behind? For the Founder and Executive Chairman of OMNIYAT Group, the Dubai-based real estate and investment platform, a building is judged by how long it stays meaningful after its opening day. He describes his developments as heirlooms, launches only when product, impact and demand align, and thinks of his portfolio on a timescale of generations. It is a way of working that explains how the company he founded in Dubai in 2005 grew into a diversified Group, whose portfolio passed AED 120 billion.

The conviction came before the company. As a young entrepreneur, Mahdi Amjad spent months travelling the world to study the buildings whose presence had outlasted their eras, trying to understand what gives architecture the ability to endure. When Dubai’s leadership announced the reforms that would open its property market, he saw decades of growth taking shape and moved with quiet certainty. He was among the first to buy plots in Business Bay the moment the district was announced, an early expression of his trust in a leadership that had set out to design the future.

That journey has been shaped by long lasting partnerships with some of the world’s most respected names in architecture and hospitality, from Foster + Partners to Dorchester Collection. None ran deeper than his collaboration with Dame Zaha Hadid on The Opus which he credits with changing how he and the company think about design. In 2016, he honoured her memory by endowing the Zaha Hadid / OMNIYAT Fellowship Fund at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, extending her influence on to future generations of architects.

The same discipline, scarcity chosen deliberately and detail pursued patiently, now shapes the top of Dubai’s ultra-luxury market. Developments by OMNIYAT captured 23 per cent of the city’s transactions above USD 10 million between 2021 and 2025, according to Knight Frank. Behind those numbers sits a founder who walks his own buildings the way a resident would, attentive to how a space sounds, how it ages, and how it feels to come home to. Wellness and longevity enter the conversation at the first sketch, and every detail that follows is expected to earn its place.

A building must keep proving itself long after we hand over the keys. Twenty years from now, someone should walk in and understand exactly why we made every decision and appreciate its impact on the lives of people within it.

In 2024, he brought the same "best in class, in every class" ethos to the building of an institution. He established OMNIYAT Group, which spans a complete ecosystem: OMNIYAT at the height of the ultra-luxury market, Corven, the Group's asset management and services arm, rounds out the ecosystem, alongside a growing family of companies across development, hospitality and technology, and BEYOND carrying its design standards into the wider luxury segment.

The results arrived quickly. By the first half of 2026, the Group ranked among Dubai’s top three developers by registered sales and led the city’s record office market. Within twenty months from inception, BEYOND brought four masterplans to market across Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah, ranking among the top five developers in Dubai for off-plan apartment sales. The company’s pace was matched only by its global ambition as it became the Premium Sleeve Partner of Paris Saint-Germain and Official Real Estate Partner of Ascot and Royal Ascot.

When regional tensions unsettled markets in 2026, his response was to look further ahead. Construction continued across the portfolio, every project funded to completion, and he set a new target for a portfolio beyond AED 200 billion by 2030, carried by new brands, new segments and landmark developments across a wider geography.

Recognition has followed, including GRI Institute Person of the Year in 2025, the Dubai Land Department’s Real Estate Tycoon Award and selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He remains engaged across global leadership platforms including the FII Institute, the Milken Institute, and the World Government Summit.

Away from business, he supports the Edge of Life campaign, launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to rescue five million children from hunger, and is a committed patron of sport across the region and beyond.

The question that launched his journey remains the measure of every project he signs off. Some of the answers already stand on the Dubai skyline. Others are still taking shape across the UAE and the region.