Riyadh’s land program crossed into routine this week, which is the point of it. The Royal Commission for Riyadh City published eligibility results on Tuesday for the second year of Tawazoun, the Real Estate Balance program that sells residential plots to citizens at no more than SR1,500 per square meter, with applicants from the August window able to check their status on the program’s platform. A second annual cycle, run on schedule, turns a 2025 intervention into standing supply machinery, and standing machinery is what changes how a market prices.
The program’s terms are unchanged from the directives the Crown Prince issued in March 2025: between 10,000 and 40,000 plots a year over five years, scaled to supply and demand, at a capped price that sits below open-market asking prices across much of the capital. The commission has not yet published applicant or eligibility counts for the second cycle; the results so far are individual notifications rather than an aggregate. When the aggregate arrives, it will be the first hard reading of how wide demand for the capped channel runs in year two.
Housing Minister Majid Al-Hogail supplied the market reading on Thursday. The capital’s real estate market, he said in remarks reported by Argaam, is no longer driven by speculation but by developers, with price stability and corrections recorded in peripheral districts while serviced urban centers settle at what he called sustainable levels. He placed the white land fee program in the same frame: its purpose is to stimulate development and expand supply rather than to raise revenue, development license applications now cover more than 27 million square meters, and increasing supply, in his words, is the most important factor in creating balance.
The lending data adds a third panel. Banks wrote SR5.87 billion of new residential mortgages to individuals in August, level with a year earlier, across 9,810 contracts, central bank data shows. The average loan fell 19 percent from a year ago to about SR598,000. Villas took SR3.66 billion of the total, 62 percent, with apartments at SR1.91 billion and land purchases at SR290 million. The same riyals spread across more and smaller loans is what a cooling price environment looks like from inside the banking system: buyers are not borrowing less in total, each purchase simply needs less of it.
Read together, the pieces describe one policy with three levers. Fees on idle land push privately held plots toward development. Tawazoun opens a capped-price channel beside the open market. The supply both levers produce is meant to do the work that subsidies would otherwise be asked to do. The capped channel’s immediate effect is less about volume, which remains unpublished, than about reference pricing: SR1,500 per square meter is now a figure every buyer in the capital can hold against an asking price, and governments rarely publish benchmarks by accident.
The next steps are mechanical and dated. Eligible applicants move toward allocation, the fee regime keeps working through the development pipeline, and the autumn lending prints will show whether August’s smaller-ticket pattern holds. The minister’s description of a developer-driven market is a testable claim, and the next two quarters of price indices and mortgage data will do the testing.