Dubizzle Group backs Tern to rewire UAE rental payments

Dubizzle Group, the dominant online classifieds operator across the Middle East with 58 million monthly visits, has made a strategic investment in Tern, a UAE startup that lets residential tenants pay rent by credit card and earn loyalty points redeemable against flights, electronics, and retail. The deal, structured through Dubizzle Group Ventures, also locks Tern into an exclusive integration across Bayut and dubizzle, the group's two flagship property portals, embedding a fintech payments layer directly inside the region's most-trafficked property discovery surfaces.

Tern was founded in 2024 and launched in May 2025. The company says it has already processed more than AED 150 million in annualised rent payment volume, a figure that suggests early traction in a market where rental payments have historically been dominated by post-dated cheques and cash transfers. The platform charges tenants no additional fee for credit card use, instead monetising through the loyalty network it has assembled across retail, travel, and lifestyle merchants.

From search to payments: classifieds platforms push deeper into the transaction

The strategic logic mirrors a pattern visible across global proptech: property portals that built their audiences on search and discovery are under competitive pressure to capture the higher-margin, recurring-revenue layers of the property lifecycle. Rightmove in the UK, REA Group in Australia, and Zillow in the United States have each moved in this direction, adding mortgage, insurance, or digital conveyancing products to their core listing businesses. Dubizzle Group's Tern investment positions its GCC platforms along the same axis, targeting the rent-payment moment as both a utility upgrade and a customer-retention mechanism for landlords.

Haider Ali Khan, CEO of Dubizzle Group UAE, framed the move explicitly in lifecycle terms: "Rent is one of the largest recurring expenses for most households, yet the payment experience has traditionally offered very little flexibility or added value. Our partnership offers renters a more convenient and rewarding way to manage their rental payments, while also creating new opportunities for landlords and agents across the UAE."

For landlords and property managers, the platform offers fully digital rent collection and, the company argues, improved tenant retention by making the payment experience more attractive. In a UAE rental market where landlords still routinely demand multiple post-dated cheques covering six or twelve months of rent upfront, a credit-card-based alternative with loyalty incentives carries a real behavioural-shift proposition, though adoption will depend on whether landlords accept the settlement mechanics Tern operates.

GCC proptech and the loyalty-layer opportunity

The broader investment thesis sits at the intersection of two trends gaining momentum across GCC capital markets. First, sovereign and institutional investors in the Gulf have accelerated their bets on proptech and digital property infrastructure as part of Vision 2030-adjacent diversification strategies in Saudi Arabia, and as Dubai's residential market has recorded record transaction volumes over the past three years. Second, loyalty programmes are increasingly being industrialised beyond aviation and banking: regional platforms are building closed merchant networks that monetise daily spending rather than occasional purchases.

Tern's multi-stakeholder model, connecting tenants, landlords, banks, and merchants inside a single loyalty loop, sits precisely at this convergence. If it scales, it represents a new class of GCC fintech: not a payments processor, not a property portal, but a recurring-revenue rails business that extracts value from the regularity of rent without owning the underlying asset.

Surya Raviganesh, who leads Dubizzle Group Ventures, noted that Dubizzle's platforms reach half the UAE population monthly, describing the exclusive Tern integration as a synergy play for early-stage startups that can benefit from that audience density. The undisclosed investment size and the early-stage framing suggest this is a seed-to-Series-A cheque, leaving room for follow-on capital as Tern demonstrates conversion at scale. For GCC-focused proptech investors watching the classifieds-to-transaction arc, this is a signal that the region's property portals are ready to compete for the full rental stack.