For families relocating to the UAE — and for those already here, structured properly.

Residency strategy & Golden Visa

Goal: secure long-term UAE residency for principal, spouse, dependants, and key staff (drivers, household).

Routes we typically use: AED 2m+ real-estate investment route; AED 2m+ public-investment route; entrepreneur route (AED 500k+ business with incubator endorsement); specialised-talent route (executives, doctors, scientists). The Golden Visa is granted under Federal Decree-Law 29 of 2021 and its implementing regulations.

Practical timeline: 3-6 weeks once documents complete. Includes ICA / GDRFA submissions, sponsor undertakings, and family-member sponsorship. Critically — there is no minimum-day-per-year requirement, which is a meaningful differentiator from most other golden-visa regimes globally.

Common pitfall: applying through unscrupulous intermediaries who promise unrealistic timelines. We file directly with ICA/GDRFA, end-to-end.

Vehicle selection — Foundation, Prescribed Company, SPV or LLC

Goal: determine the legal structure that will hold the family's UAE assets and (often) investments globally.

Decision matrix:

• DIFC Foundation — for Dubai-centric families with existing DIFC banking and property; supervised by DIFC Courts; deep adviser ecosystem.
• ADGM Foundation — for Abu Dhabi-centric families, FSRA-regulated activities, or families wanting direct English-law application; supervised by ADGM Courts.
• DIFC/ADGM Prescribed Company — flexible holding vehicle for concentrated assets, with lighter governance than a Foundation.
• SPV — single-purpose holding vehicle, often nested under a Foundation for individual asset isolation.
• Free-zone or onshore LLC — where the structure needs to conduct active business (vs purely passive holding).

Common pitfall: defaulting to a single Foundation when the family's risk profile and asset mix calls for a multi-vehicle architecture (e.g., one Foundation per branch of the family, with SPVs for individual high-value assets).

Pre-migration tax & asset-transfer planning

Goal: minimise tax leakage and asset-transfer friction before the family changes residency.

What we coordinate: we work alongside the family's home-country tax counsel (UK, US, India, Russia, etc.) on the timing and sequencing of (i) residency change in the home jurisdiction; (ii) UAE residency commencement; (iii) asset transfers into UAE structures; (iv) trust restructurings; (v) realisation events for capital-gains-tax planning. The window between cessation of home tax residency and commencement of UAE residency is often the single most consequential planning opportunity in the entire programme.

Common pitfall: moving assets before tax residency has formally changed in the home jurisdiction, triggering exit charges or anti-avoidance rules. This is an unforced error we see depressingly often.

Banking — DIFC, ADGM & onshore

Goal: establish the banking infrastructure for the family, the Foundation/structures, and (where applicable) the family office.

Where banking sits: personal banking onshore (Emirates NBD, ADCB, Mashreq, FAB), private-client banking through a regional or global private bank (HSBC Private Banking, JPM Private Bank, UBS, Julius Baer, etc.), and structure banking in DIFC or ADGM (regulated by DFSA / FSRA respectively).

Practical timeline: 8-12 weeks for full account opening, including KYC, source-of-wealth documentation, beneficial-ownership disclosure (UBO) and ongoing-monitoring set-up. Plan accordingly — banking is often the longest single workstream.

Common pitfall: underestimating source-of-wealth documentation requirements. We prepare a one-time, properly-evidenced source-of-wealth pack at the start of the programme and reuse it across all account openings.

Real-estate acquisition

Goal: acquire residential and (often) investment real estate under the optimal ownership structure.

Ownership-structure options: direct ownership in personal name (simplest, but exposes to UAE inheritance/succession default rules); ownership through a UAE-onshore LLC (for active commercial property); ownership through a DIFC or ADGM Foundation (the most common HNW structure — combines liability protection, succession control and tax efficiency); ownership through an offshore SPV (legacy structure — less common since DIFC/ADGM Foundations matured).

Process: property identification → title verification (Dubai Land Department / DARI) → SPA negotiation → ownership structure registration → buyer's POA where remote → DLD transfer.

Common pitfall: taking direct personal title because it's simpler at acquisition, then trying to restructure into a Foundation later — which triggers DLD transfer fees and (in some scenarios) capital-gains exposure in the home country.

Succession & will planning

Goal: ensure UAE-domiciled assets pass to the intended beneficiaries on the principal's death — without forced-heirship default outcomes.

Three principal routes:

• DIFC Wills Service Centre will — drafted under DIFC Wills and Probate Registry Rules, governed by English-law principles, probated by the DIFC Courts. The most established route for non-Muslim foreign nationals.
• Civil-framework will under Federal Decree-Law 41 of 2022 — for non-Muslim residents anywhere in the UAE, registered through the Notary Public.
• Foundation-based succession — UAE assets held through a Foundation, with succession governed by the charter and by-laws rather than by inheritance law. Particularly suitable for material assets and multi-generational planning.

Practical recommendation: a combination — Foundation for material assets, a DIFC or civil-framework will for personal-use items and contingencies. Cross-border succession involving foreign assets requires coordinated planning with home-country counsel.

Family-office set-up (where appropriate)

Goal: establish a single-family-office (SFO) infrastructure for HNW and UHNW families with significant ongoing investment activity.

Frameworks:

• DIFC Family Arrangements Regulations 2024 — purpose-built SFO framework supervised by DFSA-light governance.
• ADGM Single Family Office framework — comparable framework supervised by FSRA, with deep integration into ADGM's investment ecosystem.
• Onshore family office — for families wanting full operational presence outside the financial free zones.

Set-up workstreams: investment-policy statement, governance charter, investment committee, SFO-licence application, key-person hiring (CIO, COO), banking and custody, technology stack (portfolio management, reporting), and initial-asset transfer.

Practical timeline: 4-8 months for full SFO operational launch.

Ongoing governance & next-generation

Goal: establish the long-term governance architecture that survives the principal — and that the next generation can operate without external dependency.

Components: family charter (the constitutional document); investment committee terms of reference; family council with rotating chairmanship; conflict-resolution mechanism (typically arbitration before a private panel); emergency-protocol for incapacity or sudden death; pre-agreed dispute-resolution mechanisms between branches of the family; next-generation engagement programme (often through structured education and gradual involvement in investment decisions).

Common pitfall: treating governance as an afterthought. Families that survive multi-generationally are those that put governance in place before the first major intra-family disagreement — not after.