JLL CEO says growth is now uncertain in the Middle East – CNBC
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. In the first weeks of the war with Iran, the expectation was that the impact on the global economy would be short-lived. But as the conflict has dragged on, that is no longer the case. Two weeks ago, Christian Ulbrich, CEO of JLL, said he was not “overly concerned” about interest rates, because he thought the end of the war would be coming soon. “If it doesn’t,” he told the Property Play podcast, “we have a different situation.” JLL has a major footprint in the Middle East, managing and leasing properties in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It also provides project and investment management for large-scale infrastructure and investment projects. Ulbrich said his concern first and foremost was for his employees in the region, and that he had been in close touch with managers there monitoring their safety. The business impacts, he said, depended on how long the conflict lasted. “It’s a tragedy from a point that the region was on a really strong growth trajectory, and this is, at the moment at least, interrupted for the time being,” Ulbrich said. Residential real estate transactions in the UAE were down 38% in the second week of March compared with the same period in 2025, and the value of transactions was down 42%, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs analysts. And it’s not just the Middle East. “We entered this conflict with a very strong outlook for 2026. The economy was doing really well globally and particularly well here in the U.S.,” Ulbrich said. “Inflation was coming down, still a bit sticky, but directly coming down in the U.S. [and] very much, coming down in Europe.” Now, he said, a strong outlook has given way to a new period of uncertainty. Residential buildings as well as hotels have been struck by Iranian drones in Dubai, an area that has seen arguably unprecedented urban growth in just the last decade. “What worries me the most is literally the amount of conflict and disruption in the world,” Ulbrich said. “Those existing conflicts are not solved. We add new ones, and so uncertainty is not great for the economy. As you know, the economy has a lot to do with sentiment, and we were just kind of getting to terms with the existing challenges in the world, and were off to a very good start, and now we have a new conflict, which is sizable, and therefore this adds now additional uncertainty, and that is not good for the economy.”
