Homes For Over 400,000 Families

The Sakani platform has transformed the way the Saudi people find homes. Sakani serves hundreds of thousands of monthly users looking for homes, financing and related services. A process that used to take up to 10 months can now be completed in 10 minutes.

The Sakani platform provides multiple services for the users, like immediate reservation of lands, issuing their contracts electronically, reserving units, reviewing their locations and models, obtaining financing offers and choosing the most appropriate financing agency. The platform also enables the issuance of a certificate of bearing the value-added tax for the first housing, the real estate consultant service, the engineering designs for self-construction and other services.

Since 2017 Oivan has been our close development partner in digital transformation. Their talented and dedicated team has helped Sakani become one of the leading e-services for Saudi citizens and reduce the waiting to zero

Rayan A. Alagl, Chief Solution Officer, National Housing Company (NHC)

The Vision Of The Sakani Platform 

The project started already in 2017. The ambitious goal of the Sakani platform development project is to create a one-stop-shop for a Saudi citizen to access and interact with the government with matters relating to homeownership.

Starting Point And First Steps 

Before 2017, selling off-plan units (i.e., houses and apartments still under planning or construction) was not possible in Saudi Arabia. After some trial projects (managed manually), it was evident that a large-scale rollout of the off-plan concept was only possible by first developing a supporting software solution.

Oivan was contracted, and in just about 1.5 months, we built the first version of the system. It allowed MoH to register real estate developers, planned construction projects, and then released them into the market. The system allowed a citizen to obtain a “loan promise” from a bank and book a unit. The system also permitted booking appointments for off-plan sales events (tens of them taking place around the country).

Working with Oivan experts accelerates your digital transformation and takes your customer experiment and satisfaction to the next level

Muhanad S. Alsalman, Operations Manager of Subdivision Real Estate at National Housing Company (NHC)

Challenges On The Way 

A key challenge has been to develop a robust system with a very long expected lifespan very quickly, in all the time changing (business) environment. Today, the Sakani platform enables something that didn’t exist in the Saudi Arabian real estate market 1-2 years ago.

Technical challenges are primarily due to the size of the system as well anticipated scalability and performance needs. When a product with high-demand is launched, the system immediately faces significant peak loads (the size of the target audience is Apr. 6 million citizens).

The Scale Of The Project 

The development project has been ongoing now four years, and the Sakani platform keeps evolving rapidly. New features are brought to the system continuously. Platform includes several interfaces to other systems and multiple back office tools for maintaining the content of the platform.

A native Android and iOS applications were also developed as a part of the project. A fully redesigned user interface with some additional service capabilities was be launched in Q2/2021.