The real estate tokenization market opened to foreign investors in June

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is moving towards launching a real estate tokenization market for global investors by next June, in a move aimed at facilitating foreign Muslims’ ownership of real estate in holy places through secure digital platforms.

In the context of his participation in the “Future of Real Estate Forum 2026,” the Saudi Minister of Municipalities and Housing, Majid Al-Hogail, stated that the regulatory and technical aspects of the market have reached their final stages in preparation for the launch at the international level.

The minister explained that the current experimental environment for the market includes nine companies working alongside developers within a specific scope to test coding processes and review application mechanisms, before expanding on a larger scale.

This step comes in light of the huge urban projects underway in Mecca and Medina, which aim to enhance housing capacity and serve pilgrims and visitors. It is expected that the number of visitors to Mecca will reach more than 42 million visitors by 2030, and that the number of visitors to the city will reach about 23 million visitors in the same year.

Among the most prominent of these projects is the “King Salman Gate” project in Mecca, which includes about 50,000 residential units and 16,000 hotel rooms, with ownership available to all Muslims around the world, in addition to the “Ru’a Al-Madina” project in Medina, which will include about 80,000 hotel rooms and approximately 500 residential units.

The Minister pointed out that the beginning of this trend was through the coding of basic real estate assets as the first stage of digital transformation in the sector. The tokenized assets will be transferred to the securitization market under the supervision of the Capital Market Authority, while stablecoins and the digital riyal are subject to regulation by the Central Bank of Saudi Arabia.

It should be noted that the Kingdom successfully completed the first process of encoding a title deed last November. The General Real Estate Authority is scheduled to issue technical specifications for coding at the beginning of 2026. (Bloomberg)