From Sport to Steel: Why Dubai’s Next Growth Story Is Being Built in a Warehouse

 

 

 

 

Anna Morgenstern has spent the last several years building ventures that don’t look alike on paper — a sports venue, a broadcast production studio, a tax advisory practice. Her latest, The Space 14 Estate, a 14-unit industrial development in Dubai Investments Park, might be her most quietly ambitious yet. We sat down with her to talk about why an entrepreneur known for sport and media has moved into industrial real estate — and why she thinks the timing is exactly right.

 

You’re known for Space SPORTS and Space LIVE Productions — sport and media. What took you into industrial real estate

Necessity, honestly, more than ambition. I kept running into operators — in logistics, in e-commerce fulfilment, in light manufacturing — who couldn’t find warehouse space that matched how they actually work. Everything on the market was either too old, too small, or built to a spec from a decade ago that doesn’t reflect what a modern operation needs: proper clear height, real power infrastructure, genuine truck access. I didn’t set out to become a real estate developer. I set out to solve a problem I kept hearing about from the same conversations, over and over.

 

Tell us about the development itself.

The Space 14 Estate is in DIP 2 — Dubai Investments Park — and it’s exactly what the name suggests: fourteen warehouse units across two industrial buildings, separated by a 9-metre internal access road. Each unit runs roughly 320 to 370 square metres, with a 10-metre clear internal height, which matters enormously if a tenant wants to build in a mezzanine level. We’ve kept the internal partition walls removable, so a tenant can reconfigure the space rather than being locked into someone else’s floor plan.

Construction started in July 2026, and we’re targeting completion by September 2027.

 

Why DIP specifically

Distance and infrastructure, in that order. We’re about 12 kilometres from both Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road and Emirates Road, roughly 18 kilometres from Jebel Ali Port, and about 30 kilometres from Al Maktoum International Airport. For an operator running freight daily, that’s not a location detail on a brochure — that’s the entire business case. I’d rather build somewhere the numbers work than somewhere that photographs well.

 

What kind of businesses do you see occupying these units

Logistics and warehousing operators, e-commerce fulfilment, distribution, light manufacturing — and we’ve also had interest from laboratories and businesses wanting showroom or office configurations. The units are delivered in shell condition specifically so tenants can fit them out for their own operation rather than working around ours.

On the specification side, every unit has thermal insulation on the roof and external walls, roof skylights, a private restroom, a 4-metre sectional door, and a 150mm reinforced concrete floor slab. The floors are elevated to reduce water-ingress risk, and there’s an automatic fire protection and sprinkler system throughout the estate, backed by a dedicated electrical transformer station. Each unit comes with five dedicated parking spaces plus two loading or visitor spots. None of that is exceptional on its own — but put together, it’s the difference between a warehouse you rent and a warehouse you can actually run a serious operation out of.

 

Dubai’s industrial real estate sector has been getting a lot of attention lately. What’s driving that, in your view

E-commerce, mostly, and it’s not slowing down. The volume of goods moving through this emirate has completely outgrown the warehousing stock that was built to serve it a decade ago. You have operators today who need clear height for automation and mezzanine storage, who need power capacity for cold chain or light manufacturing, who need to be genuinely close to the ports rather than close-ish. The market has been quietly asking for purpose-built industrial space for a few years now — I think what’s changed is that enough operators have said it loudly enough that developers are finally listening.

 

 

How does this venture fit alongside Space SPORTS, Space LIVE, and your tax advisory work? They seem like very different worlds.

They look different from the outside, but the underlying idea is identical: build the infrastructure other people’s ambition runs on. Space SPORTS gives teams a place to build culture. Space LIVE gives brands a way to be seen. Tax advisory gives founders financial clarity to grow without surprises. The Space 14 Estate gives operators a physical foundation to actually run their business from. I’m not diversifying for the sake of it — every venture I take on is solving the same kind of gap, just in a different sector.

 

Any advice for entrepreneurs looking at real estate as a next move?

Don’t build what’s easiest to build — build what the market has told you it’s missing. I spent more time listening to operators describe what frustrated them about existing warehouse stock than I spent looking at architectural plans. The spec sheet for The Space 14 Estate came out of those conversations, not out of a generic industrial template. That’s the only research that actually matters in this sector.