Muscat – Majlis A’Shura hosted H E Dr Khalfan bin Said al Shuaili, Minister of Housing and Urban Planning, to discuss the ministry’s plans on Sunday.

Topics of discussion on the agenda included public policies for housing and urban planning, land allotment and partnerships with the private sector.

“The ministry has completed preparation of draft laws on real estate development, a unified address system and expropriation for public benefit. The ministry is also working on a draft on the amendment of the land registry system, the housing law and the urban planning law,” H E Shuaili said.

He informed that the ministry is in the process of establishing several smart cities (model cities) along the lines of the Smart City project in Seeb.

The ministry is also preparing plans to start a concept called ‘Greater Wilayat’, for which is has assigned work of designing a structural plan for Greater Muscat to an expert. “Work is underway to prepare structural plans for Greater Salalah and Greater Sohar, based on the regional plan for Dhofar and North Batinah governorates.”

The ministry is expanding projects under the National Initiative for Integrated Residential Neighbourhoods (Sorouh) by offering three new sites with more than 4,000 housing units. “Work is on to offer ten more sites in several governorates in 2022.”

He added that the ministry has supported the real estate sector by reducing fees for sale of land from five per cent to three per cent. There were more than 205,000 real estate transactions till the end of April 2022 valued at RO3.2bn.
The ministry is currently distributing land to 23,000 applicants in compliance with Royal Orders.

“Further, we are studying 35,000 applications for land allotment which were received from 2020 to April 2022. In the next stage, we are targetting 27,000 applications,” H E Shuaili stated.

The ministry has made strides in achieving future readiness by launching several digital platforms that have had a significant impact on governance, transparency and oversight, besides speed of transaction completion.

About requests of the people of Najd in Dhofar, H E Shuaili said, “Specialists in the ministry, in cooperation with the concerned authorities, have developed mechanisms to survey agricultural land in the Najd region for the benefit of citizens.”