Middle East Business
Riyadh heritage development draws SAR 2 billion of bank financing for branded homes
By Staff Writer | 18 August 2026
Diriyah Company has signed a SAR 2 billion financing agreement with a Saudi lender to fund branded residences across the 14 square kilometre Diriyah masterplan and the 62 square kilometre Wadi Safar masterplan, its first funding arrangement with that bank.
Diriyah Company has secured a SAR 2 billion financing agreement, equivalent to 533 million dollars, from Arab National Bank to fund the development of branded residences at Diriyah and Wadi Safar, north west of Riyadh. The agreement was announced on 17 August and signed by the developer's group chief executive and the bank's chief wholesale bank officer, Louai Alzaher. It is the first financial arrangement between the two.
The money is earmarked for residences delivered under hotel and resort brands, a category the developer has placed at the centre of a residential programme covering both masterplans. Diriyah itself extends to 14 square kilometres. Wadi Safar, the second site, extends to 62 square kilometres and is planned to carry residences, hotels, cultural and educational assets and sports and leisure facilities.
This new agreement with anb shows once more the confidence of large-scale financial institutions and institutional investors in the long-term success and return on investment that Diriyah offers. Our 300+ branded residences portfolio is the flagship of our larger residential strategy to build 18,000 homes for 100,000 residents across Diriyah and Wadi Safar in the future.
Jerry Inzerillo, Group Chief Executive Officer of Diriyah Company
What has already been committed
The developer has awarded more than 30 billion dollars, or SAR 110 billion, of contracts to date. The wider scheme is put at 63.2 billion dollars, or SAR 236 billion. Those two numbers set the shape of the procurement still to come: rather less than half the stated capital value has been placed with contractors, which leaves a substantial balance of packages to be let over the remaining programme.
A residential target of 18,000 homes for 100,000 residents, of which the branded portfolio is described as the flagship, is a pipeline of design, enabling, structural and fit out packages that will be tendered in tranches rather than as a single award.
Why a financing agreement is a procurement signal
A funding line of this kind is not itself a construction contract, and it should not be read as one. What it does tell a contractor or a consultant is that a specific tranche of work now has committed money behind it. On a scheme of this length, packages tend to move when the funding for them closes, and the branded residences have now been separately funded from the wider programme.
The second point worth noting is the lender. Bank debt raised in the domestic market, rather than sponsor equity alone, brings a lender's own reporting and drawdown conditions into the delivery chain. Those conditions usually sit behind payment mechanisms and certification requirements further down the contractual line, and they are the reason a subcontractor two tiers away can find its cash flow governed by a document it never sees.
What to watch
The figures that matter next are award figures rather than funding figures. The developer reports contracts placed cumulatively, so the movement in the 30 billion dollar total is the measure of how quickly the branded residences translate into tenders. Anyone pricing work on either masterplan should also confirm which entity is contracting, because the two masterplans are described separately and the financing has been signed at group level.