RIYADH: Real estate observers say that the price of land in the north, east and west of the capital has gone up by between 15 and 20 percent due to increased prices of planned urban zones and a rise in demand for home ownership. Real estate analyst Fahd Al-Mashrafi says that the movement now is towards areas outside the planned urban zone as investors seek to avoid high land prices and areas of population density. “I expect land prices in Riyadh to continue to increase for at least a year, and that will be accompanied by a drop in purchasing at the higher prices,” he said. “Real estate is slow to fall, and the drop won't be felt for around a year and a half.” Real estate company owner Hussein Abdullah said that the population of the Kingdom stood at 27.1 million, 18.7 million of them Saudi citizens who have brought an increase in demand leading to prices rising. “The rise in the total number which has grown by approximately 38 percent has contributed to the rise in rents,” he said. According to Salah Al-Mutairi, the Kingdom is seeing rises both inside and outside planned urban zones and a rise in the price of prefabricated duplex homes. “The long-awaited real estate mortgage law is likely to be brought in the first quarter of this year,” he said. “Growth in demand for residential land and for prefabricated duplex houses has pushed the real estate index to high levels, and the public expects the mortgage law to solve this problem, and expects it to bring prices down to reasonable and realistic levels.”
