ROSHN Group has signed agreements with Saudi developers to sell and develop land inside its Sedra community in north Riyadh, led by two contracts with Arabian Dyar worth SR1.1bn covering more than 55,000 square metres. The model shifts construction risk to private balance sheets while ROSHN keeps the masterplan.
ROSHN Group has signed a set of agreements with Saudi developers to sell and develop land inside Sedra, its flagship residential community in north Riyadh, in transactions the company puts at more than SR1.3bn.
The largest is a pair of contracts with Arabian Dyar worth SR1.1bn covering a plot of more than 55,000 square metres, on which the developer will build residential and commercial schemes inside the Sedra masterplan. ROSHN has also signed with Al Ramz Real Estate Development, at SR262m for an area of more than 14,000 square metres, and with Tiraz Arabia Real Estate Development for commercial facilities in the community.
The structure is more significant than the sums. ROSHN was set up in 2020 as the Public Investment Fund's housing vehicle and has until now built and sold its own product. Selling serviced plots to third-party developers moves the construction spend, the working capital and the delivery risk onto private balance sheets, while ROSHN retains the masterplan, the infrastructure and control over what gets built. It also turns land into cash on a shorter cycle than building and selling units does.
That matters because of the size of the mandate. ROSHN is working toward 400,000 homes by 2030 in support of the national target of raising Saudi home ownership to 70 percent, with communities under way in Riyadh at Sedra and Warefa, in Jeddah at Alarous and Marafy, in Dhahran at Aldanah, in Al Hofuf at Alfulwa and in Makkah at Almanar. Almanar alone covers about 21 million square metres and is planned for more than 33,000 units; Alfulwa runs to more than 10.8 million square metres and over 18,000 units. Building all of that directly, on the company's own contracts, would absorb capital faster than any single developer can recycle it.
The group has continued to release its own product in parallel. In January it launched two new home typologies at Aldanah in Dhahran — villas of 275 square metres and duplexes of 246 square metres — in a 1.7 million square metre community planned for more than 2,000 units, where it says more than 80 percent of the initial offering has been booked.
ROSHN's direct contracting has been dominated by large single awards to international firms. Its biggest is an SR7.7bn ($2.1bn) contract to China Harbour Engineering Company to build 6,700 residential units, mosques, community centres, retail and supporting amenities across Sedra and Warefa over a 45-month programme. It has also placed smaller packages with local contractors, including work on residential phases, sports facilities and Sedra's first district retail mall.
The land-sale model brings in a different kind of counterparty. Arabian Dyar, Al Ramz and Tiraz Arabia are Saudi private developers rather than contractors, which means the work they let will flow to the mid-tier contracting market rather than to the handful of firms large enough to take a SR7.7bn package. For contractors below the top tier, plot sales inside giga-project masterplans are becoming one of the more accessible routes into that pipeline.
The risk ROSHN takes on is consistency. A masterplan built by one developer to one specification delivers a uniform product; one built by several delivers whatever the design code and the enforcement of it can hold. Sedra is the community where that will be tested first.