Construction activity in Saudi Arabia to gain pace in 2020: RICS

Workload in Saudi Arabia’s construction and infrastructure sector will increase in 2020, after it expanded at a robust pace over the second quarter of 2019, RICS said in a recent survey.

“Saudi Arabia was the exception as private workloads across all segments of the market increased,” it noted.

Saudi Arabia has a more optimistic outlook which respondents feel is partly due to Vision 2030 acting as a catalyst for activity in the country, with workloads increasing across the board in the second quarter.

While labor and skills shortages were highlighted as constraints holding back activity, Quantity Surveyors and skilled tradespeople were the two skills most in demand in the Kingdom, the report said. 

Most markets in the Middle East saw work on infrastructure booming, which RICS attributed it to government spending. In the past, governments globally have been known to increase their fiscal outlays by using investment infrastructure and other public works projects to cover for weaker economic conditions. 

Despite expectations for an increase in workloads over the next 12 months, profit margins in the Middle East are still expected to remain under pressure, with material costs seeing a larger increase than the cost of skilled labor.

Nevertheless, survey respondents expect the cost of unskilled labor to grow by one percent in the UAE and 1.6 percent in Oman, RICS said.