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Saudi real estate developer ROSHN, one of the kingdom’s giga-projects, has moved approximately 1,000 Saudi residents into its flagship development SEDRA in northern Riyadh, portraying the announcement as a milestone that could signal to hesitant buyers that the kingdom is able to make good on its big deliverables.
“It’s not a dream anymore. It’s real. We’re at the business end,” Iain McBride, ROSHN’s commercial executive director, told Semafor at the Cityscape real estate event last week. “That gives confidence [to foreign investors].”
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ROSHN — a company wholly owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund the Public Investment Fund — is tasked with building around 400,000 new homes around the country by 2030, part of a nationwide goal of boosting Saudi home ownership to 70% by the same year.
The developer is changing the face of the capital by building up the northern part of Riyadh — or as many call it, the “New” Riyadh — into a glitzy, modern version of itself featuring integrated communities that include schools, as well as entertainment and commercial districts. ROSHN’s projects aim to house more than 2.2 million people by the end of the decade.
So far, the company has awarded contracts for fewer than 50,000 units, group chief development officer Oussama Kabbani said. One reason construction is progressing slowly is because part of ROSHN’s remit is fostering localization of its supply chain, he said. ROSHN has developed a mentor-mentee relationship with local construction companies and suppliers, with the goal being building up Saudi expertise even when such options are not as fast or cheap as foreign ones. The company, like others globally, is also suffering from worldwide supply chain disruptions.
The pressure is expected to intensify as the kingdom prepares to host the World Expo in 2030 and the men’s soccer World Cup in 2034, said McBride. “We’re really realizing that, if anything, everything’s speeding up, the demand is becoming greater,” McBride said.
It takes time, he added, for foreign suppliers to build trust in Saudi Arabia’s grandiose plans, and for them to be convinced to invest in local manufacturing, “because it’s much harder than buying something from an established supplier. There’s a lot of capital investment required for these companies to come over.”