Many young Saudis are delaying their marriages because they are not able to afford the high rental rates of apartments with their low salaries. Saudi bridegrooms have a number of responsibilities to face before getting married, such as, paying the bride's dowry, financing the wedding ceremony, and providing housing and furnishing. All of this puts prospective bridegrooms under a lot of pressure which forces some of them to put off their plans for marriage. The high rents being charged for apartments merely add to the young men's financial troubles. “I got engaged a couple of months ago and I am preparing for my marriage. My parents offered to let me live with them because I cannot afford to pay for the rent of an apartment. A medium-sized apartment rents for between SR25,000 and SR50,000 per year, which is completely out of question for me with my SR5,000 monthly salary,” said Mohammed Salem, a 26-year-old private company employee. Bridegrooms are also complaining about the quality and size of apartments, as owners are reducing the size of their apartments so that they can get as much use out of their land as possible. “After six months of searching and after seeing 40 apartments, I have decided to live in a tiny apartment in an old building that belongs to my father-in-law, because it is something that I can afford,” said Ali Naser, a high school teacher. “However, I'm really concerned about our future. When we have children, this apartment will not be big enough for all of us,” he added. “There are more than 7,000 housing units in Jeddah whose owners have chosen not to rent to tenants. Moreover, almost 11,000 real estate cases have been pending in the courts for years waiting for a judgment to be issued,” said Abdullah Al-Asmary, Vice President of the Real Estate Committee in Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI). There are many factors that have forced property owners to raise the rents that they charge their tenants. “There are many reasons for high rental rates, such as, the increasing demand and limited supply of apartments and the high price of construction materials,” said Hassan Al-Gadi, a member of the JCCI's Real Estate Committee and a manager of the Development and Expansion Corporation. The increasing demand for rental apartments is due to many reasons, such as, the desire of couples to establish their own identity by living alone in their own place. “In the past 50 years, the extended family (a group of relatives, usually spanning three generations, who live under the same roof) has started to disappear as couples seek to live in their own apartments in order to have more freedom and privacy,” said Dr. Obaid Al-Madaf, sociology professor at King Abdulaziz University. Landlords are becoming increasingly particular about who they rent to in order to avoid problems. “I prefer to rent my apartments to foreigners because they will pay the rent on time and maintain my property better than Saudi citizens who often try to get out of paying and cause damage that costs me a lot of money,” said Ahmed Ali, a real estate investor. There is clearly a need for laws that protect both apartment owners and tenants. “There seems to be a lot of ambiguity in the law, so they should write a law which protects those of us who rent apartments as well as respecting the rights of apartment owners,” said Mohammed Salem. Al-Asmary said that a recent decision from Council of Ministers which is aimed at regulating the relationship between owners and tenants seems to deal mainly with the rights of tenants. There is a need to devise deterrents for negligent tenants, such as, imposing fines or preventing them from traveling until they pay the rent that they owe. Many solutions are being considered to address the problem of the high rents being charged for apartments. Some have suggested that the rent should be automatically cut from the tenant's salary every month, which would be one of the best ways to insure the owner's rights. “Taking the rent every month as an automatic deduction from the tenant's salary might solve some of the problems and save a lot of time on both sides,” Al-Asmary explained. According to Al-Gadi, the Development and Expansion Corporation is studying an Economic Alternative Housing project, which would build complexes of high-quality houses which average income people could rent or buy at a reasonable price.
