Darak Property Index — methodology
What each series measures, where it comes from, what is suppressed and why.
v1-2026-09
Sources
- REGA — registered Ejar rental contracts, published quarterly per region.
- Ministry of Justice — registered real-estate deals, published quarterly.
- Darak — listings aggregated from 13 Saudi sources, deduplicated across them.
Government-sourced figures are used under the Saudi Open Data License v2.0. https://open.data.gov.sa/en/pages/policies/license
Coverage
| Value | Scope | From | To |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential land | City | 2020-01-01 | 2026-04-01 |
| Residential land | National | 2020-01-01 | 2026-01-01 |
| Asking rent | City | 2026-03-01 | 2026-08-01 |
| Asking rent | National | 2026-03-01 | 2026-08-01 |
| Contracted rent | City | 2025-01-01 | 2026-01-01 |
| Contracted rent | National | 2025-01-01 | 2026-01-01 |
| Contracted rent | Neighbourhood | 2025-01-01 | 2026-01-01 |
How each series is built
Contracted rent, by city: a chained index over neighbourhoods. Each quarter is compared with the previous one using only the neighbourhoods REGA published in both, weighted by the earlier quarter's contracts, and the steps are multiplied together. The level is anchored on the first quarter's contract-weighted mean, so it still reads in SAR a year. A neighbourhood that appears or disappears does not move the figure. Neighbourhoods are matched by town and name, because the same name recurs in different towns of the Eastern Province and Qassim.
National rent (contracted and asking): the same chained method over cities. A city counts from its second consecutive period, and one that stops reporting leaves the next step without moving the level. National land: the cities with a figure in every quarter, excluding Riyadh, each weighted by its deals in the first quarter, held fixed for the whole series. A city missing any quarter is left out of the national land series entirely.
Missing periods are shown as gaps, never filled in. No deals from the first quarter of 2023 carry a neighbourhood, so that quarter is absent from every land series; the next quarter is compared directly with the last one observed, and no change is quoted across the gap.
How to read these figures
- Mean rent on registered Ejar contracts, as published by REGA. City and national figures compare each quarter with the previous one over the same neighbourhoods and cities, so contracts moving between cheaper and dearer areas do not read as a rent change.
- Median asking rent for apartments listed on Darak. Monthly, so it leads the contracted series.
- Price index for residential plots in registered Ministry of Justice deals. Each quarter is compared with the previous one over the same neighbourhoods, so a change in which plots sold does not read as a price move. The first quarter of each series is 100.
- Asking and contracted rents are not directly comparable in level: asking rents are what landlords list, contracted rents are what tenants signed, and the two series cover different sets of places. Read each series against its own history.
- Riyadh is excluded from the land series after 2026-05-18, when priced Riyadh-city deals stopped appearing in every public source. Transaction counts are never published from this archive.
- The national land series excludes Riyadh in every period, including those where its data is complete, so the panel of cities stays constant and a composition change never reads as a price move.
Any cell with fewer than 5 observations is suppressed, not estimated.
Every dated release is kept as published: the page renders a frozen copy of its figures and never recomputes them. A correction is issued as a new revision carrying a visible note; a published figure is never edited in place.