About

Paimio Research is an independent research publication covering the listed real estate and construction companies of the Gulf: the developers, REITs and contractors of the UAE, and, in time, Saudi Arabia.

The publication exists because the region's information supply is conflicted. Brokers are paid on transactions, consultancies are paid by developers, and sell side coverage is thin. Paimio Research is paid only by its readers. No developer, broker or platform has any commercial relationship with this publication, and every number published here can be traced to a registry, a filing or a stated method.

The work rests on three things: the Dubai Land Department's transaction registry, read daily and mapped project by project to the companies that report to shareholders; company filings across the listed universe; and field work, because buildings can be visited and launch prices can be checked. From these come the letters, the company reports, the monthly market update, and quarterly nowcasts of developer sales published before results, with the record kept in public either way.

Everything written here is free to read. Institutions that need the data behind the letters can read more under Institutions.

About the author

I'm Emil Hartela, a Finnish analyst and the fifth generation of a construction family. Before this publication I spent years building revenue nowcasts from public data for Nordic listed companies, work that is archived at emilhartela.com, with a forecast record that can be checked against the reported numbers. I write about the Gulf because it is the one major market where construction is still the national project, and because nobody independent was covering it.

Why Paimio

Paimio is a small town in southwest Finland, and the name of a tuberculosis sanatorium completed there in 1933. Alvar Aalto designed it; it made his career, and in 2026 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site. The reinforced concrete that made Aalto's design stand, including the cantilevered sun terraces the building is known for, was calculated by a young engineer named Emil Henriksson, who changed his family name that year to Hartela and founded the construction company my family still runs. I'm named after both of them: Emil for the engineer, Alvar for the architect.

The architect got the fame. My family did the load calculations. That is roughly the division of labor this publication aims for: someone else's skyline, independent mathematics underneath it.

Questions and corrections: research@paimioresearch.com. Corrections are published, not buried.