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Saudi Arabia Report
Marcopolis presents the Saudi Arabia Report focused on the investments, doing business, economy and other topics featuring interviews with key executives. The sectors under review in this issue are industry, real-estate, ICT, investments, banking sector, telecom sector and many more.
VideosJune 30, 2015
Mortgage market in Saudi Arabia size less than 5% of GDP
- Written by Peter Matay
- Published: June 30, 2015
Yasser Abu Ateek serves as CEO of Dar Al Tamleek since 2008. Mr. Abu Ateek was previously Regional Manager, Western Region at Riyad Bank.
Yasser Abu Ateek, CEO of Dar Al Tamleek talks about outlook for the mortgage market in Saudi Arabia.
He says, "It is very small. As I said there are 200 thousand contracts out of 4.6 million units and if you look at GDP it doesn’t represent more than 5% currently. If you compare that to the UAE, there it represents 30%. We still have potential for growth. Our average market share was around 10% in the last 5 years."
"Al Rahji is the largest player in the market because it is perhaps the largest in retail. HSBC is also a large player along with Riyadh Bank. These have the largest share of the mortgage sector," he adds.
"It is still a small portion of the financial market, the total outstanding in mortgages is something like 90 billion riyals, which is nothing really; it doesn’t even represent 10% of the total assets in the financial sector. Long term funding is a real challenge. The government is establishing a refinance company to provide this liquidity, so things will look better in the future. Right now the legal framework is protected by regulations. In the past we used to work without having any legal protection, we did our best to protect ourselves. Right now there is a clear regulation. Now the financing and funding aspect is being developed as well as the supply. These three elements were lacking in Saudi but they are now coming into the market," he concludes.
