Saudi Arabia is running one of the largest property development programmes in the world, and the data infrastructure around it is thinner than the money flowing through it. Aqar is the leading marketplace, and the Aqar Saudi Arabia API is the most direct route into that market.
At 22 endpoints it is one of the deeper property APIs in the catalog. This post covers the parts that are unusual.
Natural-language search
/ai-search accepts a plain-language query and resolves it into a structured search. You pass something like “villa in north Riyadh with a pool under 2 million” and get results.
This is worth more here than it would be elsewhere, for a specific reason: Arabic. Saudi place names, property descriptors and district names appear in Arabic and in multiple English transliterations - Al Malqa, Almalqa, Al-Malqa. Building a search interface that handles that reliably is real work. /ai-search absorbs it.
For LLM-driven property assistants it removes a translation layer entirely. /search remains available for conventional structured filtering.
District-level market data
Three endpoints carry statistics rather than listings, and they are the analytical core.
/district-price-stats returns price statistics per district. Riyadh alone has hundreds of districts with very different price levels, and district is the unit Saudi buyers actually think in.
/residential-indicators returns residential market indicators for an area - the aggregate view rather than the listing view.
/district-rating returns a rating for a district, which is a compact way to rank areas without building your own composite.
Together these answer the question listings cannot: not “what is this flat asking” but “what does this district look like”. For investment screening that is the first question, not the last.
Geography, in depth
Saudi geography gets more endpoints than most: /admin-regions, /cities, /districts, /place-bounds, /reverse-geocode, /autocomplete and /directions.
/place-bounds returning boundary geometry is the one to note - it lets you do genuine spatial work, clipping listings to a district polygon rather than approximating with a radius. In a country where districts are large and irregular, radius approximations are meaningfully wrong.
/moj-categories maps to Ministry of Justice categories, which aligns the data with the official classification scheme rather than a portal-invented one.
Developers and projects
/project-details, /developer-details, /developer-projects and /projects-by-city cover new construction.
This is a larger share of the Saudi market than of most. Vision 2030 giga-projects and large-scale residential development mean new-build supply is central rather than peripheral, and developer identity carries real weight in how a project is perceived and priced. A model that treats new build as a footnote will misread the market.
Listings
/listing-details and /listing-details-by-url return full detail. /related-listings returns comparables.
/listing-views returns view counts on a listing. Like Idealista’s engagement stats, this is a demand signal you cannot derive from the listing itself. Two similar villas at similar prices are not equivalent if one is attracting five times the attention.
/categories returns the property category tree.
Market notes
Riyadh is the centre of gravity, and its northern districts have absorbed much of the recent price growth.
Jeddah is the commercial port city with a distinct market structure and its own waterfront dynamics.
The Eastern Province, around Dammam and Khobar, is oil-industry driven with a large expatriate professional population, so its rental market behaves differently from the sale market.
Three structural factors worth knowing: the market has been reshaped by mortgage availability expanding significantly over the past decade; ownership rules for non-Saudi buyers are more restrictive than in the UAE and vary by property type and location; and religious-site proximity in Makkah and Madinah creates pricing dynamics that exist nowhere else.
What people build
Investment screening. Rank districts using price stats, ratings and residential indicators, then drill into listings within the shortlist.
Property search products, with /ai-search handling the Arabic and transliteration problem.
Developer and project tracking. New supply by city and developer, which matters given how much of the market is primary.
Valuation support. District statistics as the baseline layer under a property-level model.
Relocation tools for the large expatriate workforce, combining district data with directions and amenities.
Practical notes
Handle Arabic text properly end to end - right-to-left rendering, and normalisation of Arabic characters that have multiple Unicode forms. Test with real strings.
Prefer IDs from /autocomplete over place names, always.
Areas are in square metres. Sale prices are typically total; rentals are commonly quoted annually rather than monthly, which is a genuine trap if you assume monthly and produce numbers that are twelve times wrong.
Related APIs
For neighbouring markets, see the UAE Real Estate API, which combines Bayut and PropertyFinder. The Saudi Arabia real estate data guide covers the market page, and the Real Estate Data hub lists everything else.
Disclaimer
Happy Endpoint is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Aqar. All data is collected from publicly available sources.
