Saudi nationals who own real estate in cities throughout the Kingdom, particularly in Makkah and Madina, are compensated if the government needs their land in order to carry out development projects. Prior to demolition, a citizen's property is evaluated and its value is estimated. Most citizens have no objection to selling their property for the improvement and development of cities. However, many of them feel that the property estimation and compensation offered are unfair and unjust, so they have rejected them and filed grievances in local courts demanding fairness. This is happening in most regions of the Kingdom. More than 700 compensation grievance cases have been filed in Makkah alone and are being looked into by the Administrative Court (formerly the Board of Grievances). At the same time, a large number of owners of expropriated property have refused to sign over their property, indicating their discontent with its estimated value. Recently, construction of the King Abdul Aziz Parallel Road in Makkah hit a snag after owners of expropriated properties voiced their discontent with the compensation offered. The Ministry of Justice, Chamber of Commerce and the project developer formed a joint committee to re-evaluate the compensation being offered to nearly 3,500 property owners. Osama Farghali, member of the Estimations Committee in Makkah, attributed the rise in the number of grievance cases to the delays in carrying out estimations, which is in addition to the real estate expropriation procedures that sometimes take up to three years. Farghali is demanding that a plan be drawn up to regulate and control the work of all the estimation committees in different cities. Farghali said he testified personally in the majority of the 700 cases being looked into at the Administrative Court in Makkah. He said citizens have the right to demand appropriate compensation and added that in many cases, the property estimations were not fair. In the case of Makkah, it is easy to see why: One square meter on a major street in Makkah, like Al-Hafayer Street, was estimated at SR25,000 when the price per square meter has now reached SR100,000. In internal districts, the estimations were SR20,000 per square meter whereas the price now is SR50,000. The same applies to Al-Hada planned district which was expropriated in favor of Al-Haramain High Speed Rail project. “The price per square meter was estimated at SR1,500 and this is clearly a drastically low price,” said Farghali. He added that the problem lies with the bureaucracy for payment, as the compensation entitlements are delayed for many years. In this period real estate prices rise and this leads citizens to file grievance cases. Jam'an Al-Zahrani, a resident of Al-Zahareen District in Makkah whose three-story house was estimated at SR1.7 million, says he cannot buy a house to accommodate his two families with this amount due to the current high price of real estate. Al-Zahrani said most of the property owners in the district have resorted to filing grievance cases because the compensation they have been offered is much lower than the real value of their homes. In Madina, the total estimation for expropriated property in favor of the Prince Muhammad Bin Abdul Aziz International Airport expansion has reached nearly SR700 million for 138 properties. Meanwhile, the number of people objecting has reached 80 percent of property owners. According to a Saudi national who complained in writing to Madina's Emir Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Majed, the Emir said in reply that it was the right of real estate owners to lodge a grievance within 60 days from the date of notification of compensation. The Emir also studied a file showing the unjustified difference in the financial estimation for expropriated properties in favor of the airport expansion.
