Great to be back and I'll tell you the energy at Cityscape Global 25 just keeps going and going.
I can't describe the amount of activity here, and I am absolutely delighted for our next guest, Yazeed Al Ghamdi, who is the director of emerging technologies at Roshan.
Yazeed, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Vince.
Appreciate it.
Well, absolutely delighted, and maybe you could kick us off for our viewers, perhaps in the states who's not familiar with Roshin.
Maybe give us a little background.
Absolutely.
Russian Group is one of the giga projects powered by the public investment fund.
Uh, we focus on, uh, many elements of the vision 2030, uh, housing program, quality of life.
Uh, we're building over 400,000 units in the next few years, and we're excited to be here today.
400,000 units.
It's just mind boggling to me when I hear those numbers.
Absolutely.
Uh, well, yeah, I wanted to kick it.
You, you, uh, just got done running the largest hackathon going on here at Cityscape.
Global, you know, tell me a little bit about it and uh what you know, you hear so much about prop tech, how that's affecting real estate.
What did you see firsthand?
Absolutely.
So we're here for the 3rd version this year.
So we are the one who founded the Prop Tech Hackathon within Cityscape Global.
Motion Hackathon actually focused to bring innovators, professionals, entrepreneurs, and students to participate in one place under one umbrella.
Powered by local and global partners like Microsoft, Google, and local entities to support and bring in new ideas to the real estate and prop tech field, and today we've seen great ideas, over 2800 ideas in the past three years, and today we have again over 150 people participating, competing to win 1.3 million, uh, Saudi riyal.
Well, what a great way to fund a business coming out as a winner on that.
So what a great service you're doing.
Uh, to, to everybody in the ecosystem, I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the changes that have been occurring.
We talked about Vision 2030, all of the quality of life movement, the amount of home real estate ownership by people in Saudi.
You guys started your digital sales journey not too long ago.
Talk to me about that experience and how's that uptake been by purchasers.
Absolutely, this is one of the great ideas that we're working on in Motion Group, and we have a great tech team.
So what we've done, we've translated this.
The journey that we see today happening on the ground through sales center into a hybrid and digital journey.
Today we have this launch since the end of 2023.
We've sold over 7 billion sar through the platform.
We've sold over 3400 units.
So we've seen this today.
The market of digital and real estate is actually combined together and emerged into a new experience, and the platform has grown today into the community as well.
You buy your units online and you move into the community.
It's all digital and you can use our marketplaces also on the app as well and it has a lot of services.
So today it went from a sales journey to a community experience as well.
Yeah, I want to pull on that thread a little bit if you don't mind.
Uh, it's an amazing point.
So we, we've got all of a sudden from this transformation in digital in the purchasing uh of real estate, but now you have this, I don't know if it's an unintended consequence, but a beautiful outcome that there's a, uh, community that's built from in that.
Absolutely.
You're seeing that activity in the app.
Talk to me a little bit about the app and the experience there.
So the app, it's a super app today.
It has multiple components.
You can buy your unit.
You can live in the community.
You can move into actually other experiences like Oceanfront, which is our mall.
You can explore what movie theaters are happening, what restaurants are given offers, and also we have a green community powered by AI.
Today you can identify your waste.
You can learn more, and you can plant trees using the application.
And lately we've plugged in the gamification as well.
As part of the community to have people actually into sports and walking more within the community, well, you know, I really, uh, given our background as FinTech TV, you know, you weave together so much there from the super app to sustainability to the efficiency AI.
What's next as you continue to look out into the horizon?
Absolutely.
So as part of the hackathon, what we do, we generate ideas from sustainability, IUT AI, and it's a living experience.
What we gather, we gather those ideas and.
Translate them into our applications, so their ideas actually they see their lights into the app and then they can be translated in the real life world.
And what we've seen in the first edition of the hackathon, one of the winners, he actually practiced his idea into motion and today his company is worth 20 million out of a small competition.
Wow, what a great outcome that is, and I'm sure many more to come.
Yazid, what a pleasure to get to chat with you today and share everything that's happening with Roshan and with our audience.
Likewise, I appreciate it, my friend.
Thank you.
Thank you.
