Fouad Bekkar On Global Property Portal Index, Ethical AI, And Emotional Entrepreneurship

I interviewed Fouad Bekkar, CEO at Coraly (formerly Coralyics), at the Proptech and Portal Watch conference in October with the intention of discussing all manner of industry topics. But as happens in life, things rarely stick to a script. Coraly’s big reveal during Bekkar’s keynote presentation the previous day meant we needed to start our conversation with an unexpected angle—how to track and classify every property portal in the world for trust, experience and quality.

“We are launching the Global Property Portal Index,” says Bekkar, “which will track portals across four major lenses: market experience, listing quality, discoverability, and features.”

Following our ‘Ten Questions With’ principle, what problem does the Index solve?

Bekkar explains that internal teams at marketplace businesses have different definitions of success. It leads to muddy ideas around the overall health of the consumer journey and the knock-on effect that has on overall business performance.

The Global Property Portal Index will provide an independent, holistic view of how a portal is performing, and where the low-hanging fruit for improvement really lies.

From user and agent experience to a statistically representative score for listing quality based on images, descriptions, SEO optimisation, and freshness, the Index generates a portal health check report that accurately measures a wide tranche of metrics that, to date, have remained siloed, private, and disconnected.

It’s something that hasn’t been done before, and Coraly is as good a company to give it a go as any. With over 80 AI capabilities under one roof, Coraly already works with several major industry stakeholders, including real estate agencies, MLSs, marketplaces, and property developers. The UAE-based AI specialist believes it is well-placed to build a meaningful bridge between agencies and portals that quantifies customer experiences on a micro level.

Indeed, Coraly has developed a checklist of over 100 metrics that reveal the overall quality of the business, and will also track image manipulation and usage of staging features in portals in the Index.

“It’s my fourth time speaking at the PPW, and three themes I see every time I am here keep coming up: trust, quality and AI. We have the technology to measure all of this, and we can automate almost every task. So let’s do it. We do 115 independent checks across every portal, and the portal CEOs who have seen [the Index in action] love it. All the portals we spoke to registered to get access to it.

“Portal CEOs recognise the problem. They have a lot of internal teams that speak different languages and have different definitions for success. For each team, words like Quality, Trust and Experience mean different things, which creates conflicting interests between those teams.

“[The Global Property Portal Index] will give portals an independent view of where they sit and how they can improve. We will give them full access to a platform that has all the data we have, and a scorecard from which they can track their performance against other portals in their country, regionally, or globally.”

The Index will be free for all portals, giving them access to an up-to-date scorecard. Paid subscriptions will be available for businesses that want to bolt on different datasets or check their scorecard more regularly. Portals will also have the option of plugging Coraly’s models into their own business.

One such offering is an image manipulation tool that can turn a grey sky blue, remove clutter from a messy driveway, stage empty or furnished spaces, and brighten an interior room. At the same time, portals are regularly uploading AI-enhanced images to listings with barely a disclaimer.

What makes an ethical use of AI? How might we draw the line between enhancing a product and respecting the right to the truth of the person viewing it?

“It’s a valid concern. The main intent of image enhancement and staging is to offer the user the ability to visualise things in different states and imagine what that home could look like. It is not about tricking conversions.

“[Coraly is] entering the US, and we have decided to watermark our images whenever staging or image manipulation has been used. I believe this will be imposed more and more, even by the authorities. From a compliance standpoint, there are things that you simply cannot do. For example, changing the room’s structure. If you put in furniture, you only put in furniture; if you change the curtains, you only change the curtains.

“Coraly has developed a proprietary technology that will allow Portals, MLSs and platforms to detect AI-enhanced content like images and flag them properly to users for more transparency.”

Bekkar says it took Coraly two years to reach a state where the team had total confidence in its output. “It takes accuracy. It takes ethics. Transparency is key here.”

“It’s all about the data you feed into the model. The industry is absorbing data about different types of houses. Properties in the US, France, the UAE, and the UK all have different structures, interiors and exteriors, and this needs training by a specialised model. Generic models like Gemini have a lot of data, but they are not accurate because they are not trained on specific use cases. A lot of learning and frameworks go into this.”

A quick deviation: Bekkar joined the PPW Podcast in 2025, and one throwaway comment stuck with me: Fouad sees himself as a “ruthless” CEO, which is important at a growing company, assuming you want to raise more money from investors. A lenient founder may struggle for a cash injection if they are tied to an idea that does not benefit the business. In Bekkar’s opinion, the gut instinct of the founder should prevail at the start, with decision-making slowly shifting towards market response over time.

“There is a balance when you are a founder. If you’re super innovative, data cannot back you, because you’re in the future and the data is in the past. When you start delivering products to customers, validating yourself in the market, then you have data, and at that point, you cannot be too emotional about the different products that you are delivering.

“You have to separate the emotion from what the market tells you, to not drain cash into different places that are not worthy. That’s why you see a lot of pivots in startups. And you will see a lot of startups failing because sometimes the founder is too emotionally connected to what they are building and doesn’t want to deviate.

“If it’s early and you feel that this is super innovative and it could change the market, then gut feel works. If you are in a space where you are validating with markets, then always trust the market.”

He advises entrepreneurs of something he heard at Y Combinator: “You know you have achieved product-market fit when your only choice is to scale.”

Fouad’s advice for an emotional founder who is veering towards ‘feeling’ instead of ‘thinking’ is to look to your board. The best boards accommodate founders on both a business and personal level. After all, investment for early-stage founders is mostly judged on the founder’s capabilities, not their (at the time) tiny business.

“Also, get an analytical co-founder. Being emotional is a symptom of an early founder; it is a natural part of the lifecycle. Sometimes you need it to be beaten out of you, and either you need to have a co-founder or a board that can balance this out. My advice to a lot of founders is to be very selective. It’s not only about the money, but it’s also about the companionship. A lot of investors can be very good at sitting with you, listening to you, and giving you advice based on their experiences.

“A good board will not derail you from your vision until it is proven wrong. The board cares about you being emotionally stable because they want to be at your best.”