Most celebrity business ventures run in one direction: fame first, then a licensing deal. A fragrance, a clothing line, an equity stake in something the celebrity does not operate. The name is rented out, and someone else does the work.

Bakhtiar Khattak has done something structurally different, and more interesting. The Pashto singer — awarded Pakistan’s Tamgha-i-Imtiaz in 2024 for services to the arts — is chief executive of GSB Real Estate, a brokerage based in Ajman, in the northern United Arab Emirates. He is not the face of it. He is in it, listing properties, meeting investors, and doing the unglamorous work of a Gulf brokerage in a competitive market.

What makes the case worth examining is not that a singer went into property. It is that he already owned the distribution channel.

The same audience, a different product

Khattak has spent two decades performing for Pashtun audiences in Pakistan and across the Gulf, with international concerts dating back to 2005 in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. He also spent years inside the broadcast industry — as a host at AVT Khyber in Peshawar, where he served as Creative Manager, and on Afghanistan’s Lemar TV and Voice of America.

That audience did not stay where he found it. Over the same twenty years, a large share of it migrated to the Gulf: to Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Ajman. They came for work, stayed longer than planned, and began doing what migrant communities everywhere eventually do — converting income into property.

Pakistanis are consistently among the largest foreign buyer groups in the UAE property market. And the Pashtun segment of that community shares something commercially significant: a language, a set of trusted names, and a strong preference for dealing with people from inside the community when large sums are involved.

Khattak was already one of those trusted names. The brokerage is what happens when you notice that the audience you have been singing to for twenty years is now in the market for exactly the thing you could sell them.

Why Ajman

Ajman is the smallest of the seven emirates and the least discussed in property coverage, which tends to follow Dubai’s record-breaking transaction values. That makes it easy to overlook what it is actually good at.

Entry prices in Ajman sit well below Dubai and Sharjah. For a buyer on a middle income — a shop owner, a logistics manager, a contractor — it is often the first emirate where ownership becomes realistic rather than aspirational. It is also within commuting distance of Sharjah and northern Dubai, which means a purchase there does not require changing where you work.

GSB specialises in Ajman while handling off-plan projects across the UAE, including as an authorised agent taking expressions of interest on developer launches. That combination — a home market where the buyer’s first purchase is achievable, plus access to the larger off-plan pipeline for when they are ready to trade up — maps closely onto how a migrant buyer’s portfolio actually develops over a decade.

It is a strategy built around a specific customer rather than around the most prestigious postcode.

The part most brokerages cannot replicate

Here is the structural advantage, stated plainly.

A typical brokerage buys attention. It pays for portal listings, search ads and social campaigns, competing against hundreds of firms for the same clicks, at costs that have risen every year the UAE market has grown.

Khattak does not buy attention in that market. He already has it, and he owns the channel that carries it.

He produces and hosts The BK Show, a live music-and-conversation format staged for Pashtun audiences across the GCC, with branded staging, sponsors and distribution on YouTube and TikTok. He is preparing The BK Podcast, a long-form interview series with Pashtun leaders and entrepreneurs — precisely the demographic that buys investment property.

Read as a media business, that is a content slate. Read as a customer acquisition system, it is a funnel that costs a fraction of what the equivalent paid reach would cost, and delivers a warmer relationship than any advertisement can. The audience does not encounter him as a broker. They encounter him as someone they have listened to for years, who happens to be in property.

Vertical integration between a media property and the business it feeds is common in large firms and rare at this scale. Whether by design or by accumulation, Khattak has assembled one.

The risk on the other side

The same structure carries an obvious exposure, and it is worth naming rather than glossing.

Cultural trust is an asset that depreciates fast when it is misused. An audience that followed a singer for twenty years extends him good faith; a property transaction that goes badly converts that good faith into something considerably more damaging than an ordinary customer complaint, because the disappointed party is a fan, and fans talk.

Brokerage in the UAE is a regulated activity, and the reputational stakes for someone operating under his own public name are higher than for a firm trading anonymously. Every transaction is, in a small way, an audit of the thing that made the business possible.

That is a demanding way to run a company. It is also, arguably, a discipline most brokerages lack.

What it suggests

There is a wider pattern here that marketers in the Gulf might take seriously.

The region’s diaspora communities are large, geographically concentrated, linguistically specific and commercially active — and they are increasingly served by creators rather than by institutions. The economics favour the creator: lower production costs, direct distribution, relationships built over years rather than bought by the quarter.

What is newer is creators moving from monetising attention through sponsorship to using attention to sell a high-value product directly. A brokerage is a serious version of that move. The transaction sizes are large, the regulation is real, and the operational demands are nothing like running a channel.

Khattak has a national civil award, a catalogue of Pashto music built over two decades, and a live format touring the Gulf. The question the industry should be asking is not why a singer opened a property company. It is why more businesses selling to these communities are not being built by the people those communities already trust.

Bakhtiar Khattak is a Pashto singer, television host and recipient of Pakistan’s Tamgha-i-Imtiaz. He produces and hosts The BK Show across the GCC and is chief executive of GSB Real Estate in Ajman, UAE.

Disclosure: GSB Real Estate is a client of INUBIZ Marketing, the agency owned by Pashtun Global’s founder. The relationship had no bearing on this reporting.