In its policies toward the private sector, the Ministry of Housing has demonstrated a strong commitment to supporting its partnership with major real estate companies and developers and to advancing a number of ambitious initiatives and programs that were first outlined in the ministry’s strategic objectives. Accordingly, the Ministry announced in its phased plans the construction of 280,000 housing units during 2017 under the «Sakani» program, and aims to complete one million housing units within five years.

This marked the beginning of a new phase in the Ministry’s history, as it passed the baton to the private sector to move forward with implementing the partnership in order to achieve tangible results that citizens can see on the ground. There had been an abundance of news, reports, and figures circulating about this partnership without citizens actually seeing any housing units on the ground, to the point that it became a mere example cited in the media rather than a tangible reality!!.

But now the situation is completely different from before, as the Ministry has defined the direct and specific goal of its partnership with the private sector: to drive urban and residential development that meets the needs of families and the environment, and to enable every Saudi citizen who wishes to own a home to do so before reaching the age of 30. During this year, the Ministry of Housing has signed a large number of agreements with private-sector institutions to build hundreds of thousands residential units in various cities and provinces across the Kingdom, in parallel with its announcement of housing program batches totaling 100,353 housing units through the fifth batch last June.

Of course, there are specific and well-defined criteria for selecting companies to implement the Ministry’s programs, but has the Ministry established strict penalties in the event that the contractor breaches the terms of the signed contract or, God forbid, goes bankrupt? Is there a specific timeline governing construction and handover operations? We also hope the Ministry will keep citizens informed of the stages of completion so they can be reassured about the progress of the work by publishing updates in various media outlets, and thereby listen to public opinion; so that companies do not delay their work and only rush in the final months of the contract, resulting in a hasty completion marred by poor quality and deviations from the specifications agreed upon in the contract.

While the Ministry of Housing has contracted with a number of qualified national companies capable of shouldering the burden of the partnership, there are strategic companies in the real estate market with which no partnership has been formed—such as Dar Al-Arkan, for example? This has raised numerous questions in the real estate market. We hope the Ministry of Housing will cooperate alongside its current partnerships with heavyweight companies that can help stabilize the real estate market given their immense capabilities.