RIYADH: In a major move aimed at reshaping the real estate sector, Saudi Arabia has unveiled the Real Estate Market initiative. This platform aims to elevate the management of property transactions, spanning ownership transfers, purchases, sales, and mortgages. The Real Estate Market’s primary objective is to establish a robust system for monitoring and regulating transactions, while also preventing any potential price manipulation. The newly launched market includes many services that will contribute to accelerating the implementation of real estate operations as well as providing data with high quality and efficiency. Moreover, it is expected to foster transparency and ensure fair and competitive opportunities for all stakeholders, thereby dismantling monopolistic practices. The market will also enable beneficiaries to manage real estate wealth and ensure transparency in deals. The ministry also confirmed that the real estate stock exchange will provide services for sorting and merging real estate deeds in cooperation with the Ministry of Municipal, Rural Affairs and Housing and the Saudi Central Bank. The platform will offer services to all eligible individuals and legal entities. In November 2021, the ministry started trial operations of the real estate market, including direct transactions, real estate bids, new deals, mortgage, inquiries about deeds and updating real estate deeds. In addition to this, in September 2021, it announced the digitization of more than 50 million title deeds as part of the Real Estate Wealth Digitization Initiative. Launched as part of the ministry’s National Transformation Program 2020 initiatives at the time, the title deed digitization project aimed to enhance property services and simplify property management procedures through central digitization facilities. The facilities operate round the clock and are the largest of their kind in the Middle East.