Almost every rental in this city still runs on a phone call.

Phone calls, WhatsApp threads, driver handovers and a fortnight of chasing. Not because anyone wants it that way — because nobody ever built the alternative.

Why this needed building

The rental market isn't broken because brokers are bad at it. It's broken because a rental pays a fraction of what a sale pays and costs more in time and coordination. Rationally, brokers deprioritise it.

Every landlord on the platform comes through a RERA-licensed broker. We take no direct listings. The broker keeps the client and the commission. We remove the admin.

How we got here

Property Banana was built by two people who had each spent years on different ends of this problem — one inside the brokerage, one on the tenant's side of the phone call. Kunal exited his brokerage ownership entirely to build the fix. That was deliberate.

We secured UAE PASS Service Provider approval, connected the pieces, and completed a full rental transaction end to end with no agent present. Then we did it again.

The founders

Two ends of the same phone call.

Kunal Motwani

Founder & CEO

Kunal has spent twenty years in Dubai real estate. He started managing his family's property portfolio, moved into brokerage on the rentals side, and built a reputation there before the economics of sales pulled him. He has worked across rentals, sales and investment advisory, including a period with Emaar, and invests in Dubai property himself.

Rentals never stopped bothering him. He knew exactly why it took as long as it did, and knew it wasn't anyone's fault.

He is also the reason the company is called Property Banana. His two-year-old daughter's favourite food is a banana. She can spell it. She just cannot work out where to stop — b-a-n-a-n-a-n-a-n-a. The name stuck before anyone had a chance to talk him out of it.

He runs the company on one mission: does this get a tenant into a home faster than the old way, and does the broker still get paid properly for it.

Hassan Tajuddin

Co-Founder & COO

Hassan ran treasury at a bank, which is a job that teaches you two things: how money actually moves, and how much of the moving is still done by hand. He watched technology take over that manual work in banking and went looking for where it hadn't happened yet. That led him to payments, and to founding 3-Shepherd, a DIFC fintech.

It also led him here, by a less strategic route. He moved to Dubai in 2019 and is currently living in his fifth rented home. Five leases, five times through the same process, five sets of the same frustration — the calls, the waiting, the driver who was always fifteen minutes away.

That's the half of the problem Kunal couldn't see from the inside. Property Banana works for him because he is the customer.

He also builds things. At a bank in Pakistan he led the development of the country's first bank-built FX trading platform. His home is fully automated, and he set all of it up himself. Connecting systems that were never designed to talk to each other is what he does for fun — a useful hobby in a company whose entire product is exactly that.

Technology

Salma Tajuddin

Chief Technology Officer

Salma has worked with artificial intelligence for most of her career, across fields ranging from robotics to health. What began as an interest in algorithms and intelligent systems gradually became an interest in something more practical: how technology can make ordinary, complicated things easier. That took her from research into building software, and later into running her own software company.

At Property Banana she leads the technology that connects identity, access, negotiations, contracts, payments and government systems that were never really designed as one journey. She likes technology best when the person using it barely has to notice it is there.