Tiny apartments with high rents bug Saudis

The soaring rents of four-room apartments are becoming a financial problem for many Saudi families who don’t own homes. Their problems are compounded by landlords who are building smaller flats of two rooms that cannot accommodate large families. The annual rent for a two-room apartment can exceed SR35,000.
Foreigners too are complaining about the new housing units which have tiny flats with unusually high rents. The boom in housing units is due to a rise in demand for accommodation in the cities and landlords have the most to gain from the situation as they demand high rents and refuse to compromise. The tenant is left with the choice of either agreeing to pay the higher rent or leaving the flat. Tenants’ inability to pay the rent for their houses has created a deficit exceeding SR300 million throughout the Kingdom, according to a real estate expert.
Abdullah Al-Ahmari, chairman of the real estate evaluation committee of Jeddah Chamber for Commerce and Industry (JCCI), said there are many new buildings that target expats who are living in the Kingdom temporarily through building small flats which have contributed to a drop in the supply of proper housing units for Saudi families. At the same time, high rents are likely to continue over the next five years until the Ministry of Housing achieves its project that will contribute to raise the supply of housing units in the local market and lower their prices.
“I have spent seven months looking for a reasonably priced four-room flat but I was surprised to find that most of the flats consist of two rooms with very little space and high annual rents in excess of SR30,000. Homes with four rooms have annual rents of more than SR50,000,” Ibrahim Mohammed, a Yemeni resident in Jeddah, told Arab News.
Real estate experts expect apartment construction for low-income families to stop because of this unstable situation, the volatile prices of building materials, rising demand in wages of construction workers and high land prices. The price of construction has currently increased from SR95 to SR130 per meter.
“Many expats who have left their families behind in their home countries or couples without children are interested in renting small flats consisting of two rooms,” a landlord who has a new building located in Al-Rawdah district told Arab News.
Earlier, the Housing Ministry launched an advanced electronic platform to streamline renting services, which analysts said would help reduce rents by providing tenants with different options.