Designing a fractional property investing app for Saudi investors

Before any wireframe, I draw one share across a year. It gets bought. It earns rent each month. It is revalued. It can be sold in a trading window. At the end of the term, holders vote on what happens to the building. And once a Hijri year passes, the owner wants to know what Zakat they owe.

Each moment is a screen, a notification or a record. A moment missing from the map will be missing from the product.

The map also tells you what the home screen is. For a listing app it is search. For a fractional app it is the portfolio and the wallet, because the investor's main question after day one is "when is my next payout?"

A fractional investor cannot walk through the building. The property page has to do that job, and in Saudi Arabia the regulations tell you what it must carry.

Valuations with a source and a date

Article 36 of the CMA's Real Estate Investment Funds Regulations says a fund manager must get a valuation from two accredited valuers before buying or selling any fund asset. Each valuer must be independent of related parties and hold the fellowship of Taqeem, the Saudi Authority for Accredited Valuers. A report older than three months cannot be relied on for the purchase or sale, and valuers must be rotated every five years at most.

Article 37 then asks for a revaluation of the real estate at least every six months, again by two accredited valuers, with the reports published within 15 days. The reports include the rental market value where it applies.

On screen, that means:

• Two valuation cards side by side, each with the valuer's name, the report date and a link to the report.
• The date of the next revaluation, so a stale number never looks fresh.
• The rental market value next to the contracted rent, when the two differ.
• A plain line on how the unit price is built. Article 37 defines the unit's net value as total assets minus total liabilities, divided by the number of units.

Fees in one place

Article 23 says the fund's terms and conditions must specify every fee, charge and commission, whether it is charged to unitholders or to the fund's assets. I design a single fee table on the property page and repeat the relevant fee at the moment of investing. Investors should never meet a fee for the first time on a receipt.

The structure: fund, SPV and who holds the deed

A fund can hold property through a special purposes entity, and the regulations have a whole part on funds that take that form, with the custodian keeping the assets segregated. Investors do not need the legal text, but they need a diagram: you, the fund, the SPV, the building, the tenant. Three boxes and arrows remove more doubt than a page of terms.

The marketplace card is a compressed version of all this: funding status, a Shariah badge, a funded bar, target and net yield, the minimum and the days left.

Investing is where trust is spent, so the flow should be short and should never surprise. I design it as one modal with a visible progress bar, not a chain of pages.

A typical order is: choose shares and review, sign the fund or SPV agreement, verify identity, pay, receive a certificate. Each step says what happens next.

Identity verification

Saudi users verify through Nafath, the national single sign-on. If the platform is a financial institution supervised by SAMA, the rule is firm: a SAMA circular effective 26 November 2022 requires Nafath biometric authentication at a high verification level or above whenever a relationship starts remotely. Even where that circular does not apply, Nafath can return later in the product to sign votes.

The waiting screen matters most. Show the number the user must pick in the Nafath app at display size, add a countdown, and offer resend and cancel. My Nafath sign-in guide covers every state.

Payment

Offer the local methods investors already use, with bank transfer for larger tickets. My guide to Saudi checkout with mada and Tamara covers the payment screens. Instalment schemes are a poor fit for buying fund units, so leave them out of this flow.

Rent is the reason most people buy a share, so the wallet deserves the best screen in the product.

• Available balance on top, with add funds and withdraw beside it.
• A payout timeline with the next amount and date picked out in one accent colour.
• A distributions calendar that shows Hijri and Gregorian dates together.
• Reinvest choices: back into the same property, into the highest yield, or spread across holdings.
• Type filters on transactions: deposit, purchase, rent, fee, sale, withdrawal.

If the platform distributes listed REIT units, the regulations set the floor: Article 47 says a REIT must distribute at least 90% of its net profits each year. Private funds set their own policy in their terms. Either way, show the policy in words on the property page and the actual history in the wallet.

One rule I hold to: money never animates. Counting numbers up looks lively, but on a balance it reads like a slot machine. Motion belongs to state changes, not to amounts.

The fear "my money is locked for years" is the hardest one to answer. Closed-ended property funds are not instantly liquid, and the app should say so plainly. What it can offer is a predictable way out.

The trading window

One answer is a scheduled window in which holders can sell to other investors. Show the next window's dates on the portfolio, send a reminder before it opens, and keep the order screen honest:

• Limit or market order, with the reference price from the last valuation.
• A slider that marks the allowed price band.
• Quantity, fees and expected net proceeds before the confirm button.
• Three states drawn properly: inside the band and ready, outside the band with a red field and a plain reason, and filled with a confirmation.

The exit vote

At the end of a term, or when a building gets an offer, holders decide. Article 24 of the regulations gives each unitholder one vote per unit and allows meetings and voting through modern technology under CMA requirements. Notice must go out between 10 and 21 days before the meeting, and the agenda documents must be available when the call is published. A decision passes with more than 50% of units present, or more than 75% where that threshold applies.

That reads like a product spec. A vote screen needs the meeting date, the documents, the options as clear cards (for example sell, extend or abstain), a signature step, and a results screen with bars. Holders with at least 10% of the fund's units can add topics to the agenda, so large holders need a route to do that too.

Show proof at the point of decision

For a Shariah-compliant fund, the CMA's regulations require a statement in the fund documents that the fund has been certified as Shariah compliant by its appointed Shariah board, and the terms must name the board members and their qualifications.

Most apps bury this in a PDF. I put it where the investor decides: a certified badge on the card, the Shariah board and the fatwa reference in the invest panel, and the fund structure diagram one tap away. Proof that sits next to the buy button does more than a policy page ever will.

Zakat on the Hijri year

ZATCA publishes an educational guide to individual Zakat based on the fatwas of the Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta. It says it is not binding, but it is a clear source for the logic:

• Property held for rent is not zakatable in itself. The rent is, once it reaches the nisab and a full lunar year passes, at a quarter of a tenth (2.5%).
• Property bought to trade for profit is zakatable on its value.
• For fund units held for investment, Zakat follows the zakatable assets inside the fund. If the fund announces its Zakat, the investor can multiply the fund's Zakat base by their ownership share and by 2.5%.
• The hawl is 12 lunar months on the Hijri calendar.

So the investor's intention changes the answer. The Zakat screen should ask it once (holding for income or trading), show the estimate for the Hijri year, count the months of the hawl, and say in one line that leased property value is not zakatable. Then it should point to the fund's own Zakat figure and to a scholar for anything unusual.

A Saudi investing app should be drawn in Arabic first and mirrored into English, not the other way round. Charts and progress bars flip in RTL. Video scrubbers stay left to right. A direction mark keeps neutral text, such as unit codes and IBANs, starting on the correct side.

Dates come in pairs. The hawl is counted in Hijri months, and many people track payouts and votes the same way, while bank statements use Gregorian. Show both, and let the user choose which one leads. Settings should also let people pick digits and currency display, and the official riyal symbol should sit beside every amount.

Quiet hours that pause alerts at prayer time help too. My guide to Arabic RTL interface design goes into mirroring, digits and mixed text.

I'm not a lawyer, and your counsel and compliance team own the final wording. But knowing which regulator sits behind which screen saves weeks of redesign.

• CMA, real estate funds. The Real Estate Investment Funds Regulations, last amended on 21 May 2025, set the valuation, fee, meeting and REIT distribution rules above. Since 2016 the CMA has not accepted fund valuation reports unless the valuers are Taqeem members.
• CMA, equity crowdfunding. On 27 September 2022 the CMA approved a framework for equity crowdfunding through authorised arranging institutions, including custody of client money.
• SAMA, debt crowdfunding. If the product lends to a developer instead of selling equity, SAMA's Rules for Engaging in Debt-Based Crowdfunding apply. They ask for an electronic risk acknowledgment in a pop-up before use, project pages with fees and expected returns, a statement that a listing is not advice, default rates on the homepage updated at least quarterly, and an SMS or email within 72 hours of a default.
• REGA, fractional ownership. The Real Estate General Authority announced the first tokenisation of a title deed on 19 November 2025. On 13 February 2026 it launched a second regulatory sandbox with a fractional ownership track, and said the first batch of nine platforms that built the fractional model now operates officially.
• SDAIA, PDPL. The Personal Data Protection Law came into effect on 14 September 2023, with a year for controllers to comply. Consent, rights requests and data export need real screens, which I cover in Saudi PDPL privacy screens for apps.

For more on the wider category, see my fintech app design guide, the real estate case studies and the real estate industry page. The full AQARI flow, from listing to ownership certificate, is in the AQARI case study.

If you are building a property investing product for Saudi investors, I design the screens and can build the web app in code too. See how I work on product design for Saudi teams in Riyadh. A project starts with a free 30 minute intro call, then a written scope and one fixed quote.

I read every source below on 25 October 2026, extracted the CMA regulations and the ZATCA guide as full text, and left out any claim I could not open and check.

• Capital Market Authority, Real Estate Investment Funds Regulations (unofficial English translation, amended 21 May 2025), read 25 October 2026: cma.gov.sa
• Capital Market Authority, CMA requires Taqeem membership for evaluators of real estate investment funds, 2016: cma.gov.sa
• Capital Market Authority, amendments setting out a framework for equity crowdfunding, 27 September 2022: cma.gov.sa
• Saudi Central Bank, Rules for Engaging in Debt-Based Crowdfunding, 1 December 2021: rulebook.sama.gov.sa
• Saudi Central Bank, biometric authentication for remote customer relationships through Nafath, 26 November 2022: rulebook.sama.gov.sa
• Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority, Guidelines: Zakat Jurisprudence of Individuals, read 25 October 2026: zatca.gov.sa
• Saudi Press Agency, REGA announces completion of first real estate tokenization, 19 November 2025: spa.gov.sa
• Saudi Press Agency, REGA launches regulatory sandbox featuring real estate tokenization, 13 February 2026: spa.gov.sa
• DLA Piper, Data Protection Laws of the World, Saudi Arabia, read 25 October 2026: dlapiperdataprotection.com