Moving to Saudi Arabia with family: Salaries, housing- Will Brown, a Dubai-based global-risk govt who has been touring Riyadh for work for nearly seven years, has begun to be aware of trade on his two-hour flight to the Saudi capital.
Rather than the traditional cohort of men who make up the overwhelming demographic of experts commuting to Saudi Arabia, there are now ladies and youth on board.
“The aircraft isn’t simply middle-aged white dudes flying in on a Sunday, you’re beginning to see humans go with their families,” stated Brown, who generally travels to Riyadh for the kingdom’s Sunday-Thursday working week.
Brown and his household will quickly make the cross to Riyadh full time, due to the fact his agency Control Risks, a world chance consultancy firm, is putting up its regional headquarters there.
The company desires to comply with current Saudi regulations that avert kingdom entities from doing enterprise with global businesses that no longer have their regional HQs in the united states of America by using January 2024.
The new measures are supposed to appeal to overseas funding and workers.
They are a section of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambition to open the USA to global markets, placing the capital amongst the world’s 10 biggest metropolis economies.
Doubling its populace to at least 15 million by using 2030 — notwithstanding many common obstacles associated to the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law / Moving to Saudi Arabia with family.
The push has now not long gone omitted in Dubai, the Middle East’s predominant commercial enterprise and tourism hub, which has long been the default alternative for expatriates.
As of case 2022, nearly eighty corporations have utilized licenses to go their headquarters to Riyadh, Saudi Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih stated in the latest interview, including the metropolis would emerge as “the grand capital of the Middle East, politically and economically.”
Question Marks
But the big question is whether Riyadh is ready from an infrastructure, housing, lifestyle, and even administrative standpoint for an influx of foreign white-collar workers and their families.
Equally, a question mark hangs over whether people will be prepared to abandon the relatively freer and more cosmopolitan — albeit more expensive — Dubai to move there.
Teething Issues
“There are infrastructure challenges and that’s where the teething issues are going to be, making sure there’s enough housing available, water, whether the road system can take it and so on,” said Metin Mitchell, who heads an executive recruitment firm that has been working in Saudi Arabia since 1995.
Housing Hunt
On the ground, a looming housing deficit in Riyadh has significantly pushed up rental costs. Annual payments for a two-bedroom apartment in one of Riyadh’s better neighborhoods have gone up by almost 12% over the past year to about SAR 181,000 ($48,260.
According to Faisal Durrani, partner and head of Middle East research at Knight Frank, a global real estate brokerage and consultancy firm.
Bringing pets to Riyadh is far more restrictive than in Dubai.