Saudi Arabia · Jeddah
Al Lulu Villas
A 24-villa collection in Jeddah’s northern coastal setting. Explore project photographs and request the available homes, exact plans and a viewing.
The city, in full
The Jeddah story.
The Kingdom’s oldest gateway is rebuilding its own shoreline, and the ownership rules are changing while it does.
In this story
- I.The gate to Makkah
- II.Turning back to the water
- III.The steadier market
- IV.Why the timing matters
Reviewed by the Omnia Saudi Desk · July 2026
Jeddah has been the Kingdom’s front door for longer than the Kingdom has existed. For centuries the port received pilgrims bound for Makkah, and the merchant families who housed, fed and financed them built Al-Balad, the coral-stone old town whose latticed roshan balconies still lean over its lanes, now protected by UNESCO. Then the oil decades happened, and the city that had always faced the water sprawled inland along its highways instead. What is under way now is a correction of that turn: two giga-projects rebuilding the shoreline itself, and a change in the law that lets foreign buyers own along it for the first time. In Jeddah, the coastline is the market.
I.
The gate to Makkah
Jeddah’s founding purpose was arrival. Chosen early in the Islamic era as the landing point for pilgrims bound for Makkah, the city spent centuries receiving the world twice a year and trading with it in between. The wealth that passed through built Al-Balad, the old town of coral-stone tower houses and latticed roshan balconies raised by the merchant families who housed and provisioned the hajj. It is still there, still inhabited, and now UNESCO-listed: a reminder that Jeddah was a global city long before the term existed.
The twentieth century pulled the city the other way. Oil-era Jeddah grew inland and northward along its highways, a working port and commercial capital laid out for the car, and the sea became something the city drove past rather than lived on. The Corniche stayed as the one long thread tying daily life to the water, the King Fahd Fountain marking the shoreline, but for decades the waterfront was Jeddah’s edge rather than its centre.
II.
Turning back to the water
That is the turn now being reversed, and at scale. Jeddah Central, a Public Investment Fund project, is reclaiming 9.5 kilometres of the central shoreline into a new downtown, with a beach, a marina, a stadium and an opera house in a first phase targeted for 2027. It is not a district bolted onto the city’s edge. It sits on the same coast the Corniche already made the centre of daily life, which is what separates it from greenfield ambition elsewhere in the region.
North at Obhur Creek, Roshn’s MARAFY is carving a navigable canal of around 10 kilometres through a planned city of some 52,000 homes, with a metro Red Line link in the plan and construction moving in measured phases. On the existing Corniche, Four Seasons Private Residences is expected to complete around mid-2027, setting the branded benchmark for the waterfront the giga-projects will extend. Three projects, one direction: back toward the water.
Jeddah is not adding a waterfront district. It is rebuilding the waterfront itself, nine and a half kilometres of it, while the ownership rules change around it.
III.
The steadier market
The numbers read differently from Riyadh, and deliberately so. City-wide apartments averaged around SAR 4,400 per square metre in the third quarter of 2025, with the average residential transaction near SAR 1.2 million, roughly USD 320k. Prime sea-facing stock in Ash Shati trades well above that, and 2025 closed as the Kingdom’s standout for stability: record sales near SAR 36.6 billion across about 30,500 transactions, with prices rising more moderately than the capital on a healthier balance of supply and demand. Roughly 18,000 new homes are due in 2026 and 22,000 in 2027. This is an early-cycle market that has so far declined to overheat.
IV.
Why the timing matters
As in Riyadh, the regulatory turn is what makes this a now decision. The Law of Real Estate Ownership by Non-Saudis took effect on 22 January 2026, and the Cabinet approved the geographical zones and implementing regulations on 23 June 2026. Jeddah is covered through its city centre and 55 numbered development zones, drawn on maps rather than district names. That makes the practical question property-specific: an Ash Shati, Al Hamra or Al Rawdah address must be checked against the live REGA map before anyone commits. The primary market is strong and the resale market is young, which is why this coast rewards patience over speed.
