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Reuters
Saudi Arabia’s capital markets regulator approved rules for exchange-listed real estate funds on Sunday, as part of efforts to ramp up investment in the kingdom’s housing market.
The kingdom requires private money to help finance construction of around 1.5 million homes planned over the next seven or eight years. In a bid to ease a shortage of affordable housing, the government announced proposals to build the homes in June as part of an economic reform programme.
The “real estate investment traded fundsâ€, publicly offered and traded on the Saudi stock exchange, would invest in residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural real estate, periodically distributing part of their income to holders of the fund.
The rules, the draft of which was published by the Capital Market Authority in August, cover the management, operation and ownership of the funds, specifying for example that they would not be allowed to invest more than 25 percent of their assets outside Saudi Arabia.