Saudi awards SAR 1.9 bn worth of real estate projects to Chinese players

A Chinese helping hand: Saudi players inked SAR 1.9 bn worth of agreements and MoUs with their Chinese counterparts for residential projects across Riyadh and Dammam on the sidelines of Municipal Minister Majid Al Hogail’s visit to China, where he launched the Saudi-Chinese Contracting Forum.

The details: The agreements aim to boost implementation efficiency, accelerate completion, and improve the quality of residential projects. The agreements cover construction, the localization of building technologies, knowledge and expertise transfer, the development of human capacity, and engineering design, financing solutions, project studies and pricing.

The projects:

#1- CCAC was awarded a SAR 875 mn development within Al Ruba project in Riyadh — which will house over 2k units. The wider Al Ruba project, as we previously reported, will deliver over 9k residential units in a mix of villas, townhouses, and apartments and will have an investment ticket of SAR 7.8 bn.

#2- China State Construction Engineering Corporation was awarded Dammam’s Al Rasha — a SAR 1.06 bn project housing 2.4k units.

That’s not all: The Saudi National Housing Company inked an MoU with Chinese civil engineering company Sinoma aimed at attracting global players into the Kingdom's mega-scale residential pipeline. The Saudi side also inked MoUs with leading Chinese companies, including PowerChina, CRCC, and China Construction Bank.

This comes at a time when the Kingdom’s residential market is struggling to shake off an affordability squeeze compounded by the war. Residential sales in Saudi Arabia were down 53% y-o-y in the first quarter of the year and while the slowdown was already underway before missiles started flying in late February, the war hardened a “wait-and-see” stance among buyers.