Oman is an unusually good candidate for retirement, and it does not have a retirement visa. Both halves of that sentence matter. The country has year-round sun, low crime, competent private hospitals, a cost of living well below Dubai, no annual property tax, no capital gains tax for individuals, no inheritance tax and — until January 2028 — no income tax at all. For a couple living on a pension, very...
It is the question that follows almost every enquiry about buying in Oman: can I put it on Airbnb when I'm not using it? The pitch writes itself — a sea-view apartment in an Integrated Tourism Complex, a country adding hotels and flight routes, and a nightly rate that looks flattering against the monthly rent. The honest answer has three parts, and only the first one is the one people expect. Short-term...
Oman is the quiet option in the Gulf. It has no skyline competition with Dubai, no citizenship-by-investment programme, and until recently no income tax of any kind. People arrive expecting a cheaper Dubai and find something stranger: a country where rent is genuinely moderate, electricity is subsidised in winter and punitive in August, schooling can cost more than housing, and — from January 2028 — a...
The two cheapest square feet in our entire Omani portfolio are not for sale to you. Not because they are reserved, or sold out, or expensive in disguise — but because you are not Omani. At $56 per square foot in Sur and $66 per square foot in Bidbid, they undercut the cheapest thing a foreigner can legally own in Oman by a third. Both appear on property portals. Both have brochures, floor plans and...
Every off-plan brochure in Oman leads with the same three words: flexible payment plan. Almost none of them tell you the number that actually matters — what share of the price you must hand over before you own anything. We pulled the published schedule from every Oman project on our list. Across freehold homes in the same country, under the same law, that figure ranges from 30% to 100%. One developer...
Almost everything written about selling property in Oman is written for buyers. The brochures model your entry, your payment plan and your yield. Almost nothing models your exit — and in Oman the exit is the part of the transaction most likely to surprise you, because the country's secondary market is younger and thinner than the buying market that feeds it. Here is the number that frames everything...
Beachfront property in Oman is sold under three different legal regimes, and the listings rarely say which one applies. Two homes can sit on the same stretch of Dhofar sand, forty kilometres apart, and one gives you a registrable freehold title you can pass to your children while the other gives you a lease that expires. The price does not tell you which is which — in fact, on our own list, the cheapest...
Service charges in Oman real estate are the recurring cost most foreign buyers forget to model. Most run the same mental math when evaluating a purchase: purchase price, expected rent, divide one by the other, arrive at a yield, decide whether the number is good enough. It is a reasonable starting point, and it is also incomplete in a way that quietly erodes returns for investors who never correct for it....
Ask most foreign investors to name an Omani city and they will say Muscat or, if they have done a little more research, Salalah — the two markets that dominate almost every guide, brochure and portfolio pitch built around Oman real estate. Sohar rarely makes the list — and that gap is precisely what makes it worth understanding. Sohar is Oman's largest port and industrial complex, a genuine economic...
Few infrastructure projects generate as much property-market speculation as a metro. Muscat's has been generating it for three years — and it is worth being precise about what has actually happened, because the gap between "studied" and "under construction" is where a great deal of money gets lost. Here is the honest position in 2026: the feasibility study is complete, the route is proposed, the cost is...
