From Dh1,850 salary to earning millions
Tauseef Khan’s ingenious ideas brought him real estate success
Tauseef Hayat Khan was a fresh civil engineering graduate looking for a job when the Gulf War hit the Middle East.
His father, Sheruzaman Khan, ran an auto garage in Kuwait. Khan, who studied civil engineering from India’s Aligarh Muslim University, was on his way to see his father in Kuwait and stopped over in Sharjah where his sister, Rizwana Husain, and her family lived.
Rizwana asked him to try to get a job in UAE instead of joining his father’s business as planned as the situation in Kuwait was pretty bad.
“People were running away from the country. My father lost everything he had tried to build. He was in Kuwait from 1976 until 1990. He had tried to build a small business. It was not anything big but it was enough to educate his children,” he recalls in an interview with Gulf News.
But during this turbulent time, Sheruzaman’s business had gone bust. “I had to get a job. I am the oldest boy in the family. I had to find a job immediately. My father was out of work and it was my responsibility to help the family. So I was desperately looking for jobs. I took up a small job [in Sharjah]. It was a job for a civil engineer and my salary was Dh1,850,” he says.
“It was a tough phase in my life. I had to take care of the family — which consisted of my parents and four siblings.” But the genes of entrepreneurship would win out in the end. Come 1997, Khan began to consider new business ventures. He saw opportunity in real estate. “In 1997, I started my first company with a small office in Deira,” he says.
Values and lessons
Having acquired its maiden property that year, City Tower Real Estate now has a portfolio of more than 100 buildings across the city.
Khan, however, admitted the success did not come overnight. “There was a lot of hard work, my sweat and toil that went into establishing the company it is today. When I started out on my own, it was pretty much a one-man show,” he said.
“Then 2008 happened,” he said. “The big financial crunch hit the city, but we survived it. It was my father’s values and lessons of wisdom that helped me get through this phase. My father always told me honesty, hard-work and perseverance will help me in life. That is what helped me earn my success. This is when we forayed seriously into the leasing model. Personally, for me, I wanted to learn the leasing model myself. And so we decided to change our business model completely.”
In 2016, Khan diversified his business interests into property development and launched his new venture, City Properties Development. The primary focus of the company was the then burgeoning affordable housing segment. When he talks of the risks he took, Khan keeps it matter of fact. “No business is successfully without a certain amount of risk and so it was for me.”
In 2017, he came up with the idea of interest-free instalment plans for up to 10 years. Khan introduced the first major project — Al Haseen Residences. Overnight City Properties became a well-known brand.
“We came up with a very different business plan [than previously available in the market]. Buyers could book their properties by paying just five per cent with a total of 40 per cent to be paid by the time of handover — five per cent every quarter. The remaining 60 per cent will be converted into monthly instalments spread over 10 years at zero interest,” he explains.
And Khan made a success out of this model.