(MENAFN- Trend News Agency) BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 16. Indian investors are
gearing up to enter Saudi Arabia's real estate sector, which they
say will boom over the next few years and overtake the UAE.
With major policy and fiscal initiatives, as well as ongoing
megaprojects in non-oil industries under Vision 2030, the Kingdom
is becoming an increasingly attractive destination for investors,
also in real estate.
“There are big-time opportunities in Saudi Arabia in the real
estate sector,” Confederation of Indian industry senior director,
Manish Mohan, told Arab News.
Investment in the sector is likely to yield big returns and
Indian investors are expecting returns similar to or even higher
than those that investment in Dubai property brought decades
ago.
And Mohan expected it to happen in the very near future.
“Saudi Arabia would be a different story in the next five years.
Property prices would be skyrocketing, that's why investment in
property makes sense,” he said.
“Indians are not only seeing good returns but also a good
opportunity, it's a profitable business for them.”
One of the Indian pioneers eyeing Saudi property is Strata, a
fractional investment fund in premium real estate assets, which
plans to invest $500 million over the next five years.
“Everyone has only one thing to say - if you want to put money,
you need to put money in Saudi Arabia,” the company's chief
executive officer, Sudarshan Lodha, told Arab News after a recent
visit to Saudi Arabia.
“We took a trip and understood that there are opportunities to
have an exponential return,” he said.
“Maybe the initial years might be a smaller deployment of about
$20 million to $50 million ... a five-year plan would be close to
half-a-billion dollars.”
Lodha was planning to focus on offices and warehousing in the
beginning and returns of between 12 percent and 18 percent at
least.
“Anything lower than that is not attractive to us, so if any of
the markets today are going to offer us less than that percentage
then we will not be there,” he added.
Lodha noted that Saudi Arabia could emerge as a market bigger
than the UAE where, he pointed out, the property market, especially
in Dubai, had already stabilized.
“It's been 20 to 30 years of constant development et cetera,
it's predictable growth in my view as of today,” he said.“But for
Saudi, with the kind of vision they are sitting on today, there is
a bigger scope to overachieve what Dubai has built in the last
three decades.”