How we built a B2B lead list in Dubai: 100 brokerages, researched, for under a dollar of data.

Why build the list yourself

Bought lead lists age quickly, the same file sits with every competitor who paid for it, and it tells you nothing about the companies on it. A list you build yourself takes about a day and comes with something a bought list never has: a specific observation about each company, which is what makes a first message worth answering. We needed Dubai real estate brokerages for our own outbound, so we built the list. This is the method, step by step.

From 1,256 businesses to 100

Maps data came from the DataForSEO Google Maps API at $0.002 per search, $0.044 in total. The website scan ran on our own machine, and the research was done with Claude.

What the website scan looks for

For every site, the scan read the home, contact, about and team pages and recorded what a salesperson wants to know before writing: public email addresses, WhatsApp enquiry links, chat widgets and AI chatbots, the CRM visible in the page code, advertising pixels for Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap, and the languages the site is offered in.

How we scored them

Each brokerage got a score from 0 to 100, built around two questions: how likely are they to want what we sell, and can we actually reach them?

Change the weights to match what you sell. We build AI agents and lead systems, so paying for leads and having no AI chatbot count the most.

The research on each company

The top 110 were researched one at a time: what they specialise in, a decision maker named on their own website or on LinkedIn, team size, one real observation about how they handle enquiries, the offer that fits them best, and a draft opening line. 79 of the final 100 have a named decision maker, and the rest are approached through the company's main contact.

Every email domain was checked for working mail servers. Mailbox verification belongs just before sending, because addresses change.

What we noticed

The scoring deliberately favours brokerages that already spend on leads and run multilingual sites, so these numbers describe the 100 we kept rather than Dubai as a whole. Three things stood out.

• Only 19 of the 100 offered their website in Arabic, even though multilingual sites scored higher, so the share across Dubai is likely lower still. English was universal, followed by Russian (14), French (12) and Chinese (8).
• 69 of the 100 had no chat of any kind on their website.
• The median Google rating was 4.8, so reviews do little to set one brokerage apart from the next.

Before the first email goes out

• Verify every address with a checker such as NeverBounce or ZeroBounce, and warm up the sending domain before a campaign.
• In the UAE, send relevant business offers to business addresses, say clearly who you are, and honour opt-outs immediately.
• Read every opening line before it goes out. A draft written from a website scan still needs a human edit.
• Track each company's status in the list itself, so nobody is contacted twice.

If you would rather have the list and the follow-up system built for you, see lead generation in Dubai and our real estate lead generation service.