Applications for the second year of Riyadh’s Real Estate Balance Program opened at 3 p.m. on Sunday, and the operative word is second. When the Royal Commission for Riyadh City first offered capped-price residential land last year, the exercise could be read as a one-time correction to a market that had outrun household incomes. A second annual window, on a published five-year horizon, reads differently. Land supply at a stated price is becoming a standing function of the state in the capital, and everyone holding undeveloped Riyadh land now has to price that fact in.
The mechanics are unchanged from the first round. Saudi citizens who are married or over 25, who own no property and who have lived in Riyadh for at least three years may apply through the Real Estate Balance Platform until September 15. Applications pass electronic verification, an eligibility list is published, objections are heard, and a draw allocates plots among qualified applicants, followed by off-plan sale and transfer of ownership. The commission has been explicit that timing confers no advantage and that registration guarantees nothing. Applicants found eligible last year carry into this year’s pool automatically, which means the queue compounds.
The stated range is 10,000 to 40,000 developed and planned plots a year over five years, priced at no more than SR1,500 per square meter. At the standard plot size of around 300 square meters reported in the first round, that puts the ceiling price of a capped plot near SR450,000, in districts that have included Al-Qirawan, Al-Malqa and Al-Nakheel in the capital’s north. Asharq Al-Awsat reports that the inaugural cycle allocated 6.3 million square meters of residential land through a draw conducted under independent oversight.
Supply as an Instrument
The cap sits well below prevailing asking prices for serviced land in much of northern Riyadh, and that gap is the program’s working part. Twenty or thirty thousand capped plots a year will not house the capital by themselves. What they do is change the arithmetic of holding land. Riyadh land appreciated for years on an assumption of scarcity that the city’s own growth kept validating. A recurring, published pipeline of land at SR1,500 per square meter introduces a competitor that does not negotiate, and market participants quoted in the Saudi press already describe the second year as the signal that the intervention is policy rather than event.
The eligibility screen is equally deliberate. Married or over 25, no existing property, three years’ residence in the city: the filter selects first homes and excludes portfolio buyers entirely. That routes state support through land rather than through credit. Demand-side tools, mortgage subsidies among them, raise purchasing power, and in a supply-constrained market some of that power converts into higher prices. Producing eligible land directly attacks the constraint instead, which is why the program belongs in the same policy family as the white land fees that raise the cost of keeping urban parcels idle. One instrument makes withholding land expensive; the other supplies it at a stated price. Both operate on the same variable, the price of residential land in a capital planned to keep growing through 2030.
The homeownership target that frames all of this, 70 percent of Saudi households by 2030, was built mostly on apartments, financing programs and off-plan sales. The Riyadh program adds the missing piece for the largest cohort of demand: the serviced plot on which a family builds. It is the form of ownership Saudi households have historically preferred, and the one that land inflation had pushed furthest out of reach.
What the Second Year Tests
Two numbers will define the cycle. The first is the allocation itself: the 10,000-to-40,000 band is wide, and where this year lands will show how fast the commission believes it can deliver. The second is servicing. A capped plot becomes a house only when roads, power and water reach it, so as the program scales, the binding constraint shifts from land price to infrastructure schedules. The program’s credibility compounds annually: each window that opens on schedule makes the five-year horizon more believable, and expectations about land supply, once moved, are difficult to move back. The next date that matters is September 15, when the window closes and the size of the second-year queue becomes visible.