A villa in the IXORA development in Al Barari, Dubai. On this one I advised a German investor family — with them from the first questions right through to the finish, as the technical point of contact who could give them a straight answer whenever they needed one.

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Most of that work is answering the questions that actually keep an owner up at night. What's the real status? Why is this taking as long as it is? What can still be changed, and what can't? Why is the contractor building it this way and not another? When you're funding a build from another country, those questions pile up fast — and the honest answer rarely comes from the people running the site. My job was to read the project from the family's side and tell them what was really going on.

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Where I was most involved was the snagging — the defect and quality process toward the end of the build. That is the phase where a villa is either finished properly or handed over with problems that quietly become the owner's to fix. I went through the issues, checked what got flagged against what actually needed to be put right, and made sure the questions that mattered were answered before anyone signed anything off.

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When you put capital into a build at this level, the value isn't more paperwork. It's having an engineer on your side who tells you what he actually thinks — from the first plan to the final snag. On IXORA, that was my role.