Saudi Arabia · Riyadh · Khuzam
Eyal Khuzam 1
515 villas in Khuzam, north Riyadh, with three family-home models. Compare phase 1 plots, plans and current availability alongside Eyal Khuzam 2.
The city, in full
The Riyadh story.
Most capitals grow. Riyadh is being rebuilt, and the story explains the price better than any spreadsheet.
In this story
- I.From oasis to capital
- II.The Vision 2030 build-out
- III.A city of villages
- IV.Why the timing matters
Reviewed by the Omnia Saudi Desk · June 2026
For most of the twentieth century, Riyadh was a walled, low-rise government town on the edge of the Najd plateau, better known as a seat of administration than a place anyone particularly wanted to visit. That city is gone. In its place stands one of the fastest-building capitals on earth: a population tracked toward roughly 9.6 million by 2030, a skyline adding towers on a schedule measured in months, and a government spending programme with no real precedent in the region’s history. Understanding why matters more than any single price per square metre, because in Riyadh, the story is the market.
I.
From oasis to capital
Riyadh’s story starts twenty minutes up the road, in Diriyah, where mud-brick walls still rise over the ruins of At-Turaif, the seat of the first Saudi state, founded in 1727. The capital itself grew through the oil decades into a sprawling, car-first city of government ministries, family compounds and wide, anonymous boulevards, built to administer a country rather than to be lived in for its own sake.
That changed with Vision 2030. The reform programme that reshaped the Saudi economy chose Riyadh as its proving ground, and the city has spent the years since unlearning its own habits: building parks instead of car parks, museums instead of ministries, and a metro instead of another ring road.
II.
The Vision 2030 build-out
The scale is the point. New Murabba alone is a planned 19 square kilometre downtown, large enough to hold several of Riyadh’s existing districts. King Salman Park is laid out to be the largest urban park in the world. None of this is incremental renovation. It is a capital building a second version of itself alongside the first, and choosing to do nearly all of it at once.
The Regional Headquarters Program is what turns that construction into a property story. More than 600 multinational companies have committed to moving a regional headquarters to Riyadh in exchange for access to government contracts, importing executives, salaries and demand for housing on a fixed schedule rather than an organic one.
Riyadh is not adding suburbs. It is adding entire districts, complete with their own park, mosque, school and metro stop, on a schedule measured in years rather than decades.
III.
A city of villages
For a buyer, the more useful truth is that Riyadh has never really been one city. It is a loose federation of districts, each with its own character and its own kind of buyer: the vertical, corporate density of Al Olaya and KAFD; the walled, embassy calm of the Diplomatic Quarter; the low-rise heritage scarcity of Diriyah Gate; the green, park-anchored corridor around King Salman Park. None of them compete so much as answer different questions. The district, not the apartment, is where a Riyadh decision should start.
IV.
Why the timing matters
What makes this a now decision rather than a someday one is regulatory, not just architectural. From 22 January 2026, foreign individuals can hold freehold property inside zones approved by the Council of Ministers, the first time that has been true at this scale. Apartment values had already moved roughly 10.6% in the year to mid-2025 on the back of the headquarters programme alone. Opening ownership to foreign buyers while the city is still mid-build, rather than after, is the part of the story the price has not fully caught up to yet.
