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Saudi gigaproject developer Roshn is busy building residential units while diversifying its business at the same time.

“We’ve got 50,000 homes in construction,” said David Grover, CEO of Roshn, speaking on stage at McKinsey’s Global Infrastructure Initiative in Dubai on 28 February.

Roshn, which was founded in 2019, builds homes that are sold to local Saudi nationals.

“We sold $2.5bn-worth of homes last year and collected the cash,” said Grover. “That shows how quickly Roshn has come from setting up a company with only 35 to 40 people and now having 1,500.”

The houses are part of the community housing gigaproject that Roshn is developing across the kingdom. “Our communities might have between 25,000 and 50,000 homes. That’s a city of 250,000 people,” he said.

As Roshn builds homes, it is also diversifying its business by establishing units that will develop other real estate assets and social infrastructure and provide related services for the property businesses.

“The business has morphed and changed a lot,” said Grover. “We’ve become a multi-faceted real estate developer. So now we’re developing 2 million square metres of commercial space. We have 1,000 schools and 1,000 mosques. We are delivering substations, sewage treatment plants, and six to eight-lane highways. We also have a dotcom business.”