By Prof. Jeevan D’Mello, GDArch, CMCA, AMS, LSM, PCAM, D. Litt, CEO, Zenesis Consulting, Past President – Community Associations Institute
For decades, real estate success has been measured by a familiar checklist: land acquired, approvals secured, construction completed, units sold, handover achieved. The project is declared a success, the team moves on, and attention shifts to the next development.
That mindset made sense when developments were smaller, simpler, and largely transactional. Today, it is no longer sufficient, especially in the UAE.
Modern real estate is no longer about delivering projects. It is about managing portfolios of long-life assets, complex communities, and enduring brands. Yet many developers, investors, and even asset owners still operate with a project-centric lens. This gap between how assets are delivered and how they must be managed is where value quietly erodes.
The limits of project thinking Project Thinking is finite by nature. It focuses on scope, timelines, budgets, and completion milestones. Its success metrics are largely internal and short term. Did we deliver on time? Did we stay within budget? Did we achieve practical completion?
What it does not adequately address is what happens next.
Once the ribbon is cut and the keys are handed over, a very different reality begins. Operational complexity increases. Ownership fragments. Expectations rise. Costs become recurring rather than capitalized. Decisions made during design and construction start to reveal their long-term consequences.
When assets are managed as isolated projects, teams often fail to see patterns across developments. Issues are solved repeatedly instead of systemically. Lessons learned in one asset are not embedded into the next. The organization remains busy, but not necessarily wiser.
Portfolio thinking changes the question ‘Portfolio Thinking’ shifts the fundamental question from “Did this project succeed?” to “How does this asset perform as part of a broader ecosystem?”
In a portfolio mindset, individual developments are not endpoints. They are components of a living system that includes brand positioning, operational efficiency, customer trust, regulatory exposure, and long-term asset value.
This approach recognizes that decisions taken at one site affect outcomes elsewhere. A weak handover process today becomes a governance headache tomorrow. Poorly defined operating models inflate costs across multiple communities. Inconsistent customer experiences dilute brand equity, even if each project looks successful in isolation.
Portfolio thinking forces leaders to step back and look across assets, phases, and ownership structures. It prioritizes coherence over completion.
Where value is really made or lost One of the most persistent misconceptions in real estate is that value is primarily created during development and construction. In reality, a significant portion of value is either preserved or lost after completion.
Operational inefficiencies,inadequate management planning, unclear accountability, and misaligned service models slowly but steadily erode returns. These are rarely dramatic failures. They are accumulative ones.
A portfolio lens allows organizations to identify where these leakages consistently occur and address them at source. It encourages standardization where it adds value and customization where context demands it. Most importantly, it aligns short-term project decisions with long-term portfolio outcomes.
Governance over heroics Project environments often reward heroics. Problems are solved through individual effort, last-minute interventions, and crisis management. While this may save a project, it does not build a resilient organization.
Portfolio thinking, by contrast, elevates governance. Clear roles, decision rights, escalation paths, and performance metrics become more important than individual firefighting. Success depends less on who is in the room today and more on whether the system works tomorrow.
This shift is particularly critical in large, mixed-use, or phased developments, where assets evolve over years and involve multiple stakeholders. Without strong portfolio governance, complexity multiplies faster than capability.
The leadership shift required Moving from project thinking to portfolio thinking is not a procedural change. It is a leadership one.
It requires leaders to resist the comfort of completion and engage with the harder work of stewardship. It demands patience, cross-functional collaboration, and a willingness to invest in foundations that may not yield immediate headlines but deliver enduring value.
Organizations that make this shift stop asking, “Is this project finished?” and start asking, “Is this asset set up to succeed over its life?”
In today’s real estate environment, that question is no longer optional. It is the difference between building projects and building legacies
