825,000 New Homes. One Decade.

Saudi Arabia is in the middle of one of the most ambitious residential delivery programmes in history.

According to Knight Frank, the Kingdom needs to build approximately 825,000 new homes by 2030 - requiring more than 115,000 units delivered every year. The National Housing Company alone is targeting 600,000 homes, with around 300,000 already delivered or in active delivery by end 2025. Homeownership has risen from 47% in 2016 to 65.4% in 2024, ahead of its interim targets and closing in on the Vision 2030 goal of 70%.

The scale of what is being achieved is genuinely extraordinary. The question the sector has not yet fully answered is what happens to the people who move into those homes.

Delivery at Scale Is Not the Same as Experience at Scale

Getting homes built and getting the experience of living in them right, are two different disciplines. The first is a planning, construction, logistics and finance challenge. The second is a human one.

When a national programme delivers hundreds of thousands of homes in a compressed timeframe, the pressure falls on construction speed, regulatory compliance and transaction volume. Customer experience - how residents are prepared, supported and cared for through completion, move-in and the defect liability period that follows - is rarely given the same structural attention.

In the UK, where residential delivery operates at a fraction of this scale, the Home Builders Federation found in 2025 that 93.7% of new build buyers still report defects after moving in. The systems and disciplines that prevent that outcome - proactive quality assurance, structured handover programmes, customer care frameworks - are still far from universal.

Saudi Arabia is building faster and at greater volume. The risk of that gap is proportionally larger.

The Resident Behind Every Unit

It is easy, at the scale Vision 2030 operates, to think in units. In completions. In homeownership percentages.

"Behind every “housing unit” is a family for whom this home represents security, aspiration and, in many cases, the most significant financial commitment of their lives."

That is not a sentimental observation. It is a commercial one. The long-term success of any residential programme - government-backed or private - depends on the confidence of the people living in it. Residents who experience poor quality at handover, who cannot get defects resolved, who feel unheard after moving in, do not become advocates. They become a reputational and operational cost.

The Kingdom's Vision 2030 Housing Programme has explicitly set citizen satisfaction as a key performance indicator. That ambition is right. Achieving it at scale requires the same rigour applied to quality assurance and customer care as is applied to construction volume and financing.

What the International Evidence Shows

Delivering homes well at scale is not an unsolved problem. The disciplines exist. What the best residential markets have learned - the build-to-rent sector, premium for-sale developers, large-scale mixed-use schemes - is that quality and customer experience must be designed into operational delivery, not added at the end. Proactive quality assurance embedded alongside the main contractor - not after them - resolves defects before residents arrive.

Structured customer care mobilised months before practical completion means residents are prepared, informed and supported from day one. Digital defect management creates accountability and transparency across large, multi-phase programmes where informal processes inevitably break down. These are not luxury additions. They are the operational infrastructure that makes residential delivery sustainable - for developers, for operators and for the residents who make a programme's outcomes real.

Why This Matters Now

Conductor CX is actively working in the Gulf region, with projects in Dubai and a growing presence across the GCC. What we see reinforces what the data suggests: the appetite for high-quality residential experience in the region is significant and rising. Buyers and residents expect more. Developers and operators who build the capability to deliver it will differentiate in a market that is becoming more competitive as it matures.

Vision 2030 is ahead of schedule on homeownership. The next chapter is about what living in those homes actually feels like. The opportunity for developers, operators and international partners to shape that experience - and to do it right from the start - is open now.

"The hardest part of building at scale is not the construction. It is making every home feel like it was built for the person who lives in it."

Conductor CX supports residential developers, investors and operators across the UK and GCC with Quality Assurance, Customer Care, CX Strategy and Maintenance.