06·AI / ML
Data Centre
BARNES Dubai's internal data tooling, built in two passes. First: an entity-centric valuation platform and on-demand AVM over 40K+ entities across 9 sources, backtested to 24.8% (leave-one-out backtest, July 2026) MAPE. Then, absorbed into Data Centre: a front-end and design-system overhaul of the broker-prospecting tool, a single-file PHP monolith over ~840,000 ownership records.
ResultThe valuation side turns multi-day analyst cycles into an on-demand AVM brief and surfaces ranked opportunities with an accuracy snapshot the valuation team can audit.
[ Ask about this build ]01Discover
Why it exists.
BARNES Dubai's valuation team was running multi-day analyst cycles to produce ranked opportunity briefs: pull DLD transactions, cross with KHDA records, eyeball portal scrapes, layer in flood and vegetation risk. Each brief was excellent, and finished a week after the listing had moved.
An entity-centric platform: every claim carries its own source and tier, reconciled across sources that disagree on what a building is called, how a unit is referenced, and which currency a price is in. The deployed instance was mid-reingest at 40K+ entities and 599K+ claims from 9 completed connectors; the platform registers 115 across fifteen countries, and the full local database has since passed two million entities. Data Centre's job is to make them agree without lying. On top sits the AVM Tool: type an address, read back a valuation with confidence bands, DLD comparables, a six-month forecast, and an investment score. The entity model predated this engagement; the front end, the design system, and the valuation engine's accuracy work (leave-one-out backtesting, confidence-band recalibration) did not.
Phase two, a separate engagement: the broker-prospecting tool, a PHP monolith holding ~840,000 property-ownership records, had never had a real front-end pass. Not a rebuild: a page-by-page audit taken through to merged releases against the production app.
02Define
The brief.
Collapse the valuation team's multi-day analyst brief into an on-demand surface without averaging away the disagreements between nine sources, then bring the same design standard to an interface a different team uses every day.
03Develop
What it took
Skills behind it.
Primary discipline plus the support stack.
Skills demonstrated
- Frontend EngineeringPrimary
Reworked the valuation front end with a new design system: the React and MapLibre pin-picker, the DLD-comparables panel, and the accuracy-snapshot dashboard. Carried the same system into the broker-prospecting surface as production polish.
- Web DesignSecondary
Design-system baseline plus a page-by-page audit that became a full audit-to-implementation sweep of tokens, icons, modals, and states.
- Data PipelinesSecondary
Supported data ingestion and configuration as the entity count scaled to 40K+ across 9 sources, and worked on the bulk ingestion and normalisation pipeline as coverage grew.
Develop · Notes
The build, in full.
How it came together, the decisions on the record, and the design system - kept off this page so the case study stays a read, not a scroll.
Read the full build notes04Deliver
What shipped.
The valuation side turns multi-day analyst cycles into an on-demand AVM brief and surfaces ranked opportunities with an accuracy snapshot the valuation team can audit. Data Centre is live over ~840,000 property-ownership records. The design work was a page-by-page audit taken through to merged releases against the production app, a design-token baseline, a WCAG AA contrast fix, and a table-list rewrite that removed a load timeout. On top of it sit the analytical surfaces: an Insights panel with per-community transaction prices and sale velocity, a view of the largest holders by unit count, a live data-quality page, a per-user recently-viewed trail, and an admin valuation demo that estimates from comparables.
In production with the BARNES Dubai valuation team. The AVM Tool replaces the manual cycle with an on-demand brief, freeing the analyst to spend time on the harder cases instead of repeating the same lookup, and refusing to answer confidently when fewer than three comparables support the estimate. Data Centre is live over ~840,000 property-ownership records for the broker-prospecting team, with the audit fully shipped rather than left as a report.
By the numbers
MAPE
valuation model, internal backtest snapshot
Entities
reconciled across sources
Data connectors
registered across 15+ countries; registry, geospatial and portal feeds
Interval coverage
after recalibrating the confidence bands
Properties on file
Data Centre, per-unit read model, growing with each ingest
Backend tests
with CI on every push
Research origin
The paper-to-product thread this project sits inside. The full chain, paper through benchmark to shipped, is on the thread.
- Data CentreSee thread
An on-demand automated valuation model reconciling disagreeing Dubai real-estate data sources into one auditable number.
See also
AI / ML
Barnes Dubai LLM
A domain-tuned language model for a Dubai brokerage, answering in seconds the market-comparison brief that used to take an analyst an afternoon.
Product
Barnes Dubai Dev Portal
The internal cockpit BARNES Dubai's innovation programme runs on: project tracking, analytics and a marketing-engineering toolkit in one place.
Marketing
Listing & Campaign Intelligence
A weekly listing-visibility pipeline for a Dubai brokerage, built so that it sends an alert rather than a report it cannot stand behind.