Courting foreign money: Saudi and Oman rise while Qatar and Dubai cool in Gulf property split

The Gulf may be opening up to foreign property buyers, but demand isn’t one pool of appetite — it splits sharply by market, motive, and the buyer each country’s property ownership regime was built to attract. Every Gulf state is now some version of open to foreign property buyers. Saudi Arabia published its foreign-ownership zones in June and switched on a live portal (we mapped the zones here). Oman is loosening entry terms for what it’s calling ‘integrated tourism complexes.’ The UAE and Qatar have been open for years. But talk to the people advising the buyers, and the story is less about regulation than it is about where buyers go — and where they won’t.

What the map looks like: Saudi Arabia just opened its property market to foreign buyers, and Dar Global already has expressions of interest for 350 units worth USD 1-1.5 bn. Oman posted transaction growth of 18.4% in 1Q, in the middle of a regional war. Dubai’s ultra-prime assets held their value, while peripheral apartment launches collapsed. Prices in Qatar have flatlined for over a year, with the same projects trading among the same players.

“People used to always throw the GCC into one bucket,” Cavendish Maxwell Director and Head of Business Development Zacky Sajjad tells EnterpriseAM. “It’s far more nuanced now. What happens in the UAE, and specifically in Dubai, is very different from Abu Dhabi. What happens in Riyadh and Muscat is very different, and what happens in Doha is very different.”

The rules now vary widely: In Saudi Arabia, ownership is zone-gated and, crucially, not tied to residency — no minimum investment, but no residency sweetener either. In Qatar, the right to own is bound to residency, with tiered minimum investments unlocking different privileges. In Qatar, the right to own is bound to residency, with tiered minimums unlocking different privileges. Oman bundles both, with a wider value proposition built on affordability, safety, and a regulatory environment that founder and CEO of Muscat-based real estate consultancy firm IRES & D Ismail Kamel argues has moved faster in the past two years than anything he's seen elsewhere in the region.

WATCH THIS SPACE- Left unchecked, the residency question could distort the market down the road. As some western markets have found (Hello, Vancouver and Toronto… and Madrid, London, and Singapore), non-resident buying of family dwellings tends to pile demand onto the top of the market and push prices past what locals earn — until governments are forced to reach for the brakes. Canada layered foreign-buyer taxes onto Vancouver and Toronto, then banned non-residents outright in 2023. Spain moved to scrap the golden visa that had funneled overseas cash into Barcelona and Madrid. Singapore now hits foreign buyers with a 60% surcharge, the steepest on earth, after years of watching regional and Chinese money treat it as a vault. Prime central London spent a decade as a parking lot for global capital, whole blocks bought to sit empty. Foreign buyers are rarely the whole story — supply constraints usually do the heavy lifting, and they’re very much present in markets like Riyadh — but they're a dependable flashpoint, and the response, when it comes, tends to be blunt.

Scale is the moat

Saudi’s 1Q numbers look alarming at first glance. Knight Frank put residential transaction volumes down 53% y-o-y, but none of the sources we spoke to read that data as weakness. Knight Frank MENA research head Faisal Durrani calls it “well-entrenched affordability pressures, particularly in Riyadh, rather than a weakening of underlying demand.” Moreover, many government projects were “put on hold ahead of the ownership law,” Anum Hasan, senior researcher at the GCC-based advisory firm ValuStrat, tells us. Riyadh’s five-year freeze on all commercial and residential rents is also a factor, Hasan says. And prices actually rose while transactions fell, with Riyadh apartments up 6.3% and villas up 4.9% in 1Q. In other words, supply and affordability policies, not fear, are throttling deal flow.

But the medium- and long-term fundamentals are promising: “Things were already a bit on the down-low for Saudis,” Hasan adds, but clarifies that resiliency through the conflict and recent foreign ownership rules are sweetening the pot. “Interest in Saudi is going up, up, and up… wealthy families that I advise in London are all moving out to Saudi Arabia, moving their businesses there,” says Jamal Ali, a family office consultant and investment principal at a UK-based private family office.

The foreign demand map splits cleanly by city. In Makkah and Madinah, the modal buyer is a Muslim high-net-worth individual from the Gulf, South and Southeast Asia, or the Western diaspora, driven by religion and the prospect of retiring near the Haramain. “As a smart investor, you always have a certain amount of footfall that you can count on in these places,” Hasan says.

DATA POINT- A Knight Frank survey found Makkah was the top target for Muslim (59%), Indian (56%), and Algerian (45%) respondents, while Madinah led among UK (59%) and Malaysian (58%) buyers. Riyadh and Jeddah, by contrast, draw expatriates on a 15-to-20-year horizon plus local investors expanding their portfolios, Hasan suggests. The mass offshore retail buyer is not yet focused there in full.

Two structural limits will shape the pace: There’s still no mortgage financing for non-resident foreigners, and roughly 90% of zoned supply is off-plan, with three-to-ten-year build timelines. But Saudi’s structural advantage over every neighbor is local demand — a 30 mn-plus population that’s overwhelmingly comprised of nationals. The expat-reliant UAE and Qatar can’t match that. As Hasan puts it, Saudi Arabia emerged from the conflict “on the better side of it … as one of the leading countries in the GCC.”

Oman: The strongest fundamentals, but the weakest narrative

Oman’s 1Q numbers are hard to argue with: Transaction values up 18.4% y-o-y to OMR 678 mn, the national real estate price index up 15.9%, foreign investment rising roughly 40%, and Muscat residential land prices up a remarkable 43.6% — all during a regional war.

Oman’s story is part geography, part neutrality, and part opportunism. “When this war started, we witnessed something very important,” says IRES & D’s Kamel. The conflict redirected trade through Oman’s ports at Salalah, Duqm, and Sohar — and the money followed. “A lot of people transferred funds into our pool. They are looking into investing, developing, and acquiring plots. Iranians, Iraqis, and Syrians really feel safe here.” GCC nationals buy undeveloped plots for long-term appreciation, while Indian and South Asian expatriates are the end-user base, buying for residency and family stability inside the affordable tourism complexes.

SOUND SMART- ITCs, or integrated tourism complexes, are Oman’s designated vehicle for non-GCC foreign ownership. Each must exceed 200k sqm and include residential, commercial, and hospitality elements. Buy inside one, and you get freehold ownership plus residency. The biggest are Al Mouj Muscat, Muscat Hills, and Muscat Bay. Non-GCC foreigners cannot buy outside ITCs, but GCC citizens can, subject to government approval.

The pitch is stability and value, not speculation. “If I take the same project aspects, amenities, and location boundaries and put them in Dubai, it’s almost double the price there. Returns on investment today are much higher than in any other place you go to as a developer. We're like Dubai 15 or 20 years ago,” Kamel says.

The structural sequencing is key here: Real estate is a second-order effect of getting the business environment right. “Dubai's lowest GDP comes from real estate, and the highest comes from business. That's where you create the business; business people come, and then you create the products for them.” Oman, he says, is doing that work now — Salalah Port is expanding, the Duqm refinery is growing, and Sultan Haitham City is underway.

The government recently eased one of the biggest friction points for foreign buyers so that off-plan purchasers can now get a renewable entry visa while their property is under construction, closing a gap that previously kept non-residents away until handover. But Kamel is direct about what still needs to happen. If Omanization restrictions on certain business activities were loosened, “more people coming in means the economic cycle starts to breathe better, investment starts to push up into different sectors, and out of it, real estate grows as well.”

But strong fundamentals don’t ensure visibility. Ali, the family office consultant, is blunt about the gap: “Oman is not there yet. Saudi and the UAE are making all the noise.” His framework — institutions go first, then private investors, then end-users — explains how a market this cheap stays invisible to offshore retail money. Cavendish Maxwell’s Sajjad agrees capital isn’t actively shifting from Dubai: “In an illiquid asset class like real estate, capital can’t be shifted that quickly.”

The long-term case survives the skepticism: “If you’re happy to park your money, Oman’s probably the better option,” Ali says. “Be first to market now, and in 10 years you’ll be in a very good place.”

The UAE: Resilience at the top, cracks at the edges

Dubai held together because its buyer base diversified beyond its historic GCC-and-South-Asia core to Europe, the Americas, China, and Singapore. Last year, Sajjad notes, “was the only year we found the UK coming just above India.” He reads the recent slowdown as the market having “just paused and took stock” — developer launches fell, but he reads that as supply cooling, not demand collapsing. “We've not seen a mass exodus, despite what certain Western media outlets were reporting,” he says. The genuine softening is at the periphery: one- and two-bed apartments, where a huge volume supply is coming to the market in the next three years. Meanwhile, ultra-prime stock (think: Palm Jumeirah, Downtown, Jumeirah Bay Island) is unaffected.

The resilience is structural. Buyers are borrowing healthy amounts relative to the value of the property they’re picking up (they need a 20% deposit at the consumer level), developers typically buy undeveloped plots in cash, and escrows protect purchasers. “What the UAE has done wonderfully is they've learned from past situations,” Sajjad said. “We had the global financial crisis, the price of oil collapse, the pandemic. All these things have led to a lot more sophistication.”

But the view from the other end of the pipeline is far less settled. “The European investors who were investing took a backstep because all of a sudden they found that their investment wasn't safe enough,” Ali says. One family fund he advises pulled out of a planned UAE investment round entirely when the war started: “We're still interested in investing; we just can't invest now,” he said. The on-the-ground resident sees resiliency, but the offshore allocator sees a pause. Both are true, and which one dominates depends on how much of a market's demand is local versus how much is flying in.

Qatar: The cautionary case

Qatar is what happens when you open the door, but the room behind it stays the same. It has had freehold zones — The Pearl, Lusail, West Bay — for the better part of a decade, many of which were designed around the World Cup build-out.

The buyer base is overwhelmingly expatriate and growing, but the market has flatlined. “Prices in Qatar are at best stable,” Hasan says, adding that the market is “mostly older projects trading hands among the same players again and again.” The problem is supply, not demand: “There were just not enough projects to choose from.” She reads the caution as deliberate — “[the government] wants growth, but they want controlled growth … they’re in the sustainability phase of their progress.” Ali, watching Qatar from outside, puts it more bluntly. “For some reason, everybody loves Qatar, but I don’t ever hear anyone wanting to invest in Qatar, and I don't know why.”

What’s next

Multiple sources converge on September as the moment foreign transactions start clearing in Saudi, though Hasan cautions that developers “are trying to change their strategies” around the ownership law and “these things take time.” The broader test is 3Q, and it hinges on the ceasefire. If it holds and peace negotiations progress, Sajjad says, the question stops being whether the Gulf is open — and becomes which market foreign money actually chooses.