About the author
Javier Sanz Alvarez Founder and CEO, Oliva. RERA BRN 1573501, DLD Broker Card 92025. Twelve-plus years building and selling regulated platforms before Oliva.
Javier Sanz Alvarez is the founder and CEO of Oliva, the data-driven Dubai real estate platform that scores every project across seven independent dimensions and surfaces only DLD-verified deals. He is a Dubai Land Department (DLD) registered broker (Broker Card 92025) and a RERA-registered agent (BRN 1573501).
Javier's career has been spent at the operating end of regulated finance. He started at Gala Capital, a Madrid-based private equity firm, working on mid-market M&A, restructurings, and portfolio analysis across Southern Europe. He then ran global operations at Emoji Company, the Universal Studios licensing partner, building a €300M-revenue IP-licensing business across more than 30 markets. From 2017 to 2024 he was President and CEO of Ninety Nine, an ESMA-regulated digital broker-dealer he built into a platform serving 5M+ users and €5B in daily volume across all 27 EU markets via MiFID II passporting, before pivoting it into B2B infrastructure for four of the world's twenty largest banks and selling it to a tier-one investment bank.
He founded Oliva to bring that same underwriting standard to Dubai property. Before launching, Javier worked across institutional real estate and private capital, underwriting deals where the difference between a good and a great asset is measured in basis points, not marketing copy. That same lens drives Oliva's editorial: every claim about a developer, an area, or a market trend has to trace back to a primary source - the DLD transaction record, the RERA project filing, the UAE Central Bank's mortgage data, or an on-the-record interview.
Javier's reporting focuses on the parts of the Dubai market most foreign investors get wrong on their first attempt: how off-plan payment plans actually work once Oqood is registered, how RERA escrow protections behave when a project is delayed, how to read a DLD price-per-square-foot trend without being misled by mix shift, and how the Golden Visa property route interacts with mortgage lending and joint ownership.
He writes Oliva's flagship long-form pieces, fact-checks the team's market analyses, and signs off on every developer profile published on the site. When a Dubai real estate story is wrong on Oliva, it's Javier's name on the correction.
Javier holds a BSc in Finance, Business and Auditing from CUNEF Universidad (Valedictorian, 2013) and Harvard's Advanced Finance Program (2013). He speaks English and Spanish, lives in Dubai, and meets investors in person at the Oliva office in Business Bay. For press, research, or partnership requests, contact press@joinoliva.com.
