JEDDAH: A leading Saudi architect is of the view that the real estate bubble needs to be corrected to realize the government's vision of decent housing for all.
"The real estate sector is ridiculously over priced, it is a bubble," said Hisham Malaika, principal of the architectural engineering firm Saudi Diyar, in a recent interview with Arab News, while offering solutions to the housing issues.
In order to realize Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah's vision of providing decent living to the low- and middle-income groups, firms like Saudi Diyar need to take the lead along with developers to build such units, while also setting up programs to enhance Saudization.
"We in Saudi Diyar have already begun our own program of training and assimilating young talented Saudis, and today we have a happy mix of Saudis and non-Saudi working toward building the company's profile and prospect."
In a wide-ranging interview, Malaika, an architect for 20 years, said some of his clients had already asked him to provide design solutions for the housing for low- and medium-income families in the Kingdom.
"We too recognize that this is an important provision for the development of the Kingdom, and we will try to provide the best housing solutions," that would meet their income, their living standards and uphold dignity as well as, a sense of community within the areas they are living to create healthy and sustainable communities."
"There's now one project outside Riyadh where we have submitted a proposal to build a 1,000-unit housing complex. Which is specifically targeted for the low- and medium-income families.," Malaika said.
"I would also like to say that whilst the king has highlighted the need for these type of housing for the sustainable growth of the country, the problem lies in the price and cost of real estate in Saudi Arabia," he said.
"The cost of real estate is over inflated, and it is prohibitive for real estate developers to finance projects made for low- and medium-income families," he added.
This is one issue. The second issue that's making the growth of the sector difficult or obstructing the growth of the sector is that until now we do not have a home loan mortgaging system that's comparable to the developed world.
"So these two factors -- the current cost of the real estate plus the fact that we do not have a structured home loan mortgaging system -- is prohibiting the developers from forcefully promoting and spearheading visionary projects for these category of families," Malaika stressed.
"So as architects we wait for the clients to ask us for these types of projects before we can provide these solutions, and unless the clients are developers than there is no motive for anyone unless they can make a profit."
He added: "At Diyar, we are also working at building affordable housing and housing for families in Saudi Arabia. We as architects are able to provide a diverse range of housing, that is according to the needs, goals, missions and objectives."
Malaika also emphasized the need for Saudization. But he was realistic about the prevailing situation.
"We cannot succeed in this kind of situation without recruiting and hiring specialized expertise in each of the areas we hope to penetrate and in the areas we hope to become service providers," he said.
"Our intention is to always to give priority to Saudis and our mission is to recruit as many Saudis within Diyar. However, we have not been as successful as we would like to be in this area. There are many complex issues related to effective Saudization and many of these issues are not in the control of private sector companies, many of these issues are related to the educational system and the governmental support we would get. While one of the issue has to do with the work ethic and values of the Saudis themselves."
On work ethic development, retention of talent and stemming the brain drain, the Diyar principal was explicit in his observation.
"I am talking specifically about private sector. It is a double-sided problem," he said.
"On the one side you have undeveloped broad ethics and broad values by many young Saudis, who have been accustomed to a relative affluent upbringing and who have faced no real hardship in life and we have unrealistic expectations of promotion of opportunities and income capabilities.
"What compounds the problem is that the private sector business owners have the short-term view that emphasizes immediate profitability over growth and development.
"They are myopic in their attitude in seeing their business opportunities, prioritizing their business on these scale in trying to make the profits in the short term with quick business deals as opposed to developing their organization and developing Saudis, investing in Saudis and allowing them to grow in the organization.
"Unfortunately, some of these business owners look at the Saudis as necessary evil they have to hire in order to fulfill the Ministry of Labor requirements for Saudization, but without any general interest in developing their Saudi resources. There are exceptions to every rule and these are the outstanding intelligent, capable with high work ethic Saudi graduates and also the outstanding conscientious and conscious business owners who are willing to do much, much more to develop the Saudi resources," he said.
Malaika, who has worked with world-renowned architectural Norwegian company called Snohetta Architects, which designed the Alexandria library in Egypt, claimed that his two years in Saudi Diyar has been fantastic.
"Saudi Diyar has the right organizational culture that can add value to the community," he said.
"We believe in Saudi Diyar that we have achieved a high degree of professionalism in our niche area of architectural engineering," he added.
He said: "We believe we can leverage our excellent reputation in the market in order to provide outstanding engineering services, specifically in the field of infrastructure, process engineering and oil and gas.
"We believe in investing personally as in promoting and developing in-house expertise, and abilities of our staff and building the knowledge base of our own organization. However, this does not prevent us from teaming up with leading international consultants in different areas.
"We will pool our expertise and know how while utilizing our local expertise and know how to create a formidable team.
"Though we do not have a formalized CSR department, but what we do is on a yearly basis is that we hire as many university trainees as possible for a one-year period and we train them and at the end of the period, we select who we believe are the most capable and competent of the trainees that we had hired.
"Today some of our leading architects and engineers are Saudis who are working in excess sometimes of over 50-60 hours per week in order to fulfill client requirements," Malaika said.
Continuing on Diyar's capabilities, he said: "One of our biggest achievements in architecture is the building in which we are right now. This is Diyar's design and it is called 24 North Jeddah. This building is not only, nominated for the 2007 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, but we are proud of being nominated especially because the design was in-house. We also hired a company to evaluate this building against the LEED standard and we are absolutely delighted that this company was three points away from gold LEED (a reference point) for sustainable architecture building. This gave us a huge boost in terms of belief in our own creative capabilities and expertise, how will we impact our community the most, it will be by promoting sustainable values to provide excellence that simultaneously promotes sustainable environmental-friendly values."
Saudi Diyar, an architecture and engineering consultancy firm that provides architectural master planning, interior designs, construction management as well as project management services to all building types available, is a lead player in the high-rise projects in the Kingdom.
"Usually in Saudi Arabia high-rise projects are done by international consultancies, but we are now proud that we as a Saudi office are able to do high-rise projects locally and in-house," he said.
"Two of the key high-rise projects that we are doing now, one is called the Lamaar Towers on the corniche in Jeddah (under construction) all done in-house and the other prestigious project in Riyadh also under construction, the King Saud University Endowment project. This is a mega project and also includes high-rise towers as one of the group of facilities. The third high-rise project, Al-Mada Tower, for which we are waiting for our client's clearance. This is another twin tower residential project and with the tallest tower being 82-stories high. This is also in Jeddah corniche. This will provide the state-of-the-art residential units of the highest international standards. This applies both to Lamaar and Al-Mada. This type of building is new to Saudi Arabia and I would think that it was influenced by the development of Dubai, with the state-of-the-art architecture and living accommodation has influenced Saudi Arabia and more and more clients are looking at Dubai as a reference point," he said.
© Arab News 2011
