Marriott Residences at AIDA — Branded 1-Bedroom Apartments from OMR 139,200 in Muscat, Oman

Marriott Residences at AIDA: Branded 1-Bedroom Apartments From OMR 139,200 in Muscat

Marriott Residences at AIDA is the branded-apartment collection inside AIDA by DarGlobal, the cliff-top community at Yiti, east of Muscat. On the developer’s price list it comprises 26 one-bedroom apartments in Building A, on floors 2 to 9, priced from OMR 139,200 (about $362,031) to OMR 193,570 (about $503,437). It is the only apartment collection at AIDA that carries a hotel brand, and the price shows it: per square foot the Marriott apartments cost roughly 30% to 65% more than the attached villas in the same community and 35% to 80% more than our other new one-bedroom listing on the Muscat coast. This page looks at what that premium buys, how the 26 listed units are priced against each other, and what a buyer should ask before paying a token. For the whole community, see our page on AIDA Oman by DarGlobal.

Every figure below comes from the developer’s unit price list for Marriott Residences and from the AIDA brochure. The list gives unit code, bedrooms, built-up area, view and price, and a token of OMR 4,000. It does not give a payment plan, a service charge, a handover date or a floor plan. Dollar figures convert the developer’s rial prices at the peg of 2.6008 and are rounded.

Marriott Residences at a Glance

The brochure’s description is short: one-, two- and three-bedroom fully furnished apartments with “bespoke à la carte services, concierge, valet and everything you need”. The masterplan groups Marriott Residences with The Great Escape under “apartments”. Only one-bedroom units appear on the list we hold, so we cannot price the two- and three-bedroom apartments the brochure mentions, and we say so rather than guess. If you want a larger Marriott home, ask for its list and price before you decide anything else.

All 26 Listed Units

The unit codes appear to read as building, floor and unit: MRA-5-512 is Building A, fifth floor, unit 12. That is our reading of the pattern and the developer can confirm it. The table gives every unit on the list, sorted by floor.

The cheapest apartment on the list is MRA-5-512, at 698.47 sq ft and OMR 139,200, and the dearest is MRA-8-809, at 962.73 sq ft and OMR 193,570. The cheapest per square foot is unit MRA-2-210 at OMR 197.5, and the dearest is MRA-6-607 at OMR 215.9, so the differences between rates are small: across all 26 units the rate runs from OMR 197.5 to OMR 215.9, a spread of 9%. That narrowness is itself a finding, and the next two sections explain it.

Twelve Sizes, Three Main Layouts

The 26 apartments come in twelve slightly different sizes, from 698 to 963 sq ft, which is a larger range than the word “one-bedroom” suggests. The table groups them.

Three sizes (963, 940 and 811 sq ft) occur four times each, 784 and 783 sq ft together occur three times, and most of the others appear twice. In practice that means the building has a small number of one-bedroom layouts, with the largest around 960 sq ft, which is about 89 square metres and generous for a one-bedroom. If you are buying to rent, the smaller 698 to 746 sq ft units are the entry tickets, and the 940 to 963 sq ft units are for owners who want space. We have no floor plans, so we cannot say how the extra area is used, and we would ask for the plan for the layout you are considering.

How the Price Is Built: Floor and View

The price list follows a visible formula, and it is worth knowing before you pay for height. On a plain golf view the rate rises by about OMR 0.6 per square foot for each floor, from OMR 197.5 on the second floor to OMR 201.7 on the ninth. The view matters far more than the floor.

Five apartments have a partial sea view along with the golf view (units 207, 507, 514, 607 and 614), and they are priced at OMR 213.5 to OMR 215.9 per square foot, about OMR 15 or 7.5% above a golf-view unit on a neighbouring floor. A glimpse of the sea therefore costs more than three times what the whole climb from the second floor to the ninth does (7.5% against about 2%). For a buyer, the practical conclusion is that a high floor with a golf view is much better value than a low floor with a sea glimpse, unless the glimpse is what you want. For an investor, the more useful point is that the price list gives no sign of a large premium for height, so the units that will stand out at resale are the sea-view ones.

What the Brand Adds, and What It Costs

Branded residences sell the service as much as the apartment. The brochure’s list is concierge, valet and “à la carte” services, and the apartments are described as fully furnished. Those are real advantages for a second-home owner who will not be there, because the building runs the home in their absence. They also cost money, and the price list tells us nothing about how much. Four questions decide whether the premium is worth paying.

First, what is the service charge, in which currency, and what does it include? A branded building typically has a higher charge than an unbranded one, and the earlier DarGlobal figure for AIDA apartments, which we have not confirmed for Marriott, was AED 10 per square foot a year; on a 750 sq ft apartment that would be about $2,040 a year. Second, is there a rental programme, and on what terms: what share of the income the operator keeps, how many nights the owner may use the apartment, and whether the owner can opt out. Third, how long is the brand licence, and what happens to the name and the services if it ends. Fourth, what is the furniture package, who chose it and what does it cost to replace. Our guide to service charges in Oman covers what a charge should include, and our guide to rental yields in Oman shows what yields look like in operating buildings.

Marriott Residences Against the Alternatives

The comparison is the clearest way to see the premium. The Marriott one-bedrooms cost about 35% to 80% more per square foot than ALMAR Residences in Al Mouj, and about 30% to 65% more than the Amour Sans Détour villas, which are three-bedroom houses. What you are paying for, relative to those, is the brand, the furnishing and services and the golf-view setting inside AIDA, in place of the marina setting at Al Mouj or the extra bedrooms of a villa. Whether that is worth it is a personal question, but it should be answered with the numbers above and not with the logo.

Ownership and Residency

AIDA is sold freehold to buyers of any nationality, and our guide to freehold property in Oman explains the regime; the sale and purchase agreement for your unit is the place to check the title wording. On residency, Oman’s 10-year Golden Residency needs a single property worth at least OMR 200,000 in an Integrated Tourism Complex, and the dearest Marriott one-bedroom on the list, MRA-8-809, is OMR 193,570, so no listed unit reaches it by OMR 6,430. A larger Marriott apartment that is not on the list might. The Owner Visa has no minimum value, and our comparison of Golden Residency and the Owner Visa sets out both. The brochure mentions a “lifetime residency visa”, which is not one of the routes we have documented.

What Is Around the Building

The Marriott apartments sit in the golf-facing part of AIDA, and their views are of the golf course and, for five units, a slice of the sea. Owners of AIDA homes have access to the Residence Club, which the brochure describes as including a pool, gym, steam and sauna, padel court, restaurants, a pharmacy and clinic, a nursery and a prayer room; the Trump International Golf Club is a membership club to which owners and outsiders may apply. The journey times on the brochure’s map are one minute to the planned Nikki Beach Resort and Spa, two to Yitti Beach, ten to the Ritz-Carlton, twenty to Downtown Muscat and twenty-five to Muscat International Airport. Other DarGlobal material gave longer airport times, so drive it yourself, particularly if you plan to let the apartment.

How the Purchase Works

The sequence is the standard off-plan one: reserve with the OMR 4,000 token, sign a sale and purchase agreement, pay on the agreement’s schedule, and take handover on completion. Oman’s Real Estate Law 79/2025 provides for escrow and preliminary registration of off-plan sales, and our guide to the law explains what is protected. Ask where the escrow account is held, who certifies each construction milestone before a payment falls due, and what the long-stop date is. Our guide to Oman payment plans shows what other developers ask for, which is useful because the Marriott list gives no plan to compare.

Paying in Rials, and the Cliff Setting

The prices are in Omani rials, pegged to the dollar. A dollar buyer carries no exchange-rate risk; a buyer paying from euros, pounds, zloty, roubles or rupees does, and our guide to the Omani rial peg measures how far that has mattered. AIDA stands 130 metres above the sea, which removes the storm-surge risk of a seafront building but not the questions of wind, runoff and drainage, covered in our guide to cyclone and flash-flood risk for Oman property buyers. If you plan to borrow, see mortgage in Oman for foreigners; the brochure refers to a mortgage programme and we have not seen its terms.

Exit and Resale

Branded apartments are among the easier homes to resell in a market that is still young, because a buyer understands the brand and the service package. They are also among the easier to compare, because 26 near-identical units are listed on one price list, and a resale buyer will be able to see which are dearer and why. The sea-view units are the scarce ones. We have no resale history for AIDA, and we would not underwrite capital growth; the practical advice in our guide to selling property in Oman is to buy a unit you would be content to use or rent if you could not sell it.

A Worked Comparison

The numbers are easiest to feel with two pairs of real units from the list.

The second pair is the instructive one. A buyer who prefers the sea glimpse is paying about OMR 7,200 for a smaller apartment, and for that money could have had 27 more square feet and a golf view. That can be a good decision if the sea matters, since the sea-view units are the scarce ones, but it should be a decision and not an accident. The first pair shows the other side: moving from the smallest to the largest one-bedroom adds roughly OMR 205 per square foot, which is almost exactly the average rate, so size is priced linearly and there is no discount for buying big or premium for buying small.

What “Golf View” Means Here

Twenty-one of the 26 listed apartments have the label “golf view” and nothing more. The brochure’s aerial image of the Marriott buildings shows two blocks sitting beside the fairways, and the price list names the first “Marriott Residences A”, which implies that there is at least a second building. Two questions follow. Which building and which side is the apartment on, since a golf view from the second floor of a block is a different thing from one from the ninth? And is there a later phase, a second building or a clubhouse extension, that could change the view? The developer can answer both, and a sketch of the site with the apartment marked is a reasonable thing to ask for.

The Full Cost of Buying and Holding

The price on the list is the start of the budget. Around it sit several items that are not on the list: the registration and transfer costs of the purchase, the cost of insuring the unit, utilities and, most significantly, the service charge and any rental-programme fee. The furniture package is described as included in a “fully furnished” apartment, and you should ask for the inventory and the replacement cost. For the larger Marriott apartments not on the list, the same items scale with size. We have no figures for these costs at AIDA and we will not guess, but we would build a ten-year cost of ownership before comparing the Marriott apartments with an unbranded home, and the property tax in Oman guide covers the taxes. A branded building can still be good value, particularly for an owner who will not be there and values being looked after, but only once the running cost is known.

Who Marriott Residences Suits

The collection suits a second-home buyer who wants a managed, furnished apartment in a golf-and-sea setting and who values the hotel brand’s service. It suits an investor who has read the rental-programme terms and priced the service charge. It suits less well a buyer looking for the lowest price per foot, a larger family home, or a home with the sea in front of the door: the Amour Sans Détour villas are cheaper per foot and larger, the ALMAR apartments are cheaper per foot in a marina setting, and the Fairway, Trump and Fendi Casa villas are the choices for space and the fairway or the sea.

What a Hotel Brand Normally Means, and What We Do Not Know

In branded residences the hotel operator typically lends its name and standards, and often supplies the services and the management of the building, in return for fees paid by the developer and the owners. Whether that is the arrangement at Marriott Residences at AIDA is a matter for the contracts, and nothing in the price list or the brochure sets it out. What the brochure promises is a service menu: concierge, valet and à la carte services. What it does not say is who provides them, who pays, how the charges are set, and whether owners can choose not to use them. Those are the terms that turn a brand from a marketing name into a protection or a cost, and they are the first thing to read in the draft agreement.

Letting a Branded Apartment

The brochure presents AIDA as a place for ready-to-go investment, with branded homes managed for the owner, and describes the homes as approved for short-term rental. We have no occupancy, rate or income data for the building, which has not been completed. As with the villa pages, the table below is arithmetic on the price, not a forecast, and it shows the gross rent a given yield would imply.

The gross figure then has to bear the service charge, the operator’s or manager’s share, utilities, insurance and any tax on rental income. The share kept by an operator in a branded programme can be a large fraction of room revenue, which is why the net yield on a branded apartment is often well below the gross yield on an unbranded one. Our guides to rental yields in Oman and renting out an Oman property from abroad cover those deductions. Ask whether the apartment may be let through the Marriott programme only, through other channels, or both, and whether a licence for short-term letting is held for the building.

Timing and Construction Risk

The price list has no handover date. In June 2024 Dar Global said AIDA Phase 1 was set for completion in 2027, and earlier DarGlobal material phased completions between Q1 2027 and Q4 2028; we cannot tell which date applies to a Marriott building. An off-plan buyer carries the construction risk until handover, and a date that slips can mean a year or more of payments for a home that cannot be used or let. Our guide to Oman payment plans and our guide to the off-plan law explain the protections, and the questions that matter are the same here as elsewhere: a stated date, a long-stop date and a refund right. Our handover calendar for Oman shows how other developers’ dates compare.

Step by Step: From Enquiry to Handover

1. Choose the unit, not just the collection. Ask for the current availability of the Marriott Residences units and the plot or floor plan for the one you want, since the list shows that neighbouring units are priced differently.
2. Reserve with the token. The price list shows OMR 4,000 (about $10,403) against every unit; ask in writing what it secures, for how long, and under what terms it is refundable.
3. Read the sale and purchase agreement before you sign. Check the seller, the price, the payment schedule, the specification, the handover date, the delay remedy and the title wording.
4. Confirm the escrow. Under Oman’s Real Estate Law 79/2025, off-plan payments should be protected; ask for the escrow account details and check them independently.
5. Pay on milestones, and verify them. Ask who certifies that each construction stage has been reached before the next payment falls due.
6. Arrange currency and insurance. Decide how you will convert from your own currency, and ask what insurance covers the building and what you need for the contents.
7. Inspect at handover. Check the villa or apartment against the specification, record defects and ask about the defects-liability period.
8. Register the title and set up running costs. Complete the registration, open the utility accounts and agree the service-charge billing.

What We Can and Cannot Confirm

Questions to Ask Before You Reserve

• Which entity signs the sale and purchase agreement, and where is the escrow account?
• What are the payment plan, the handover date and the long-stop date for Building A?
• What is the service charge per square foot, in which currency, and what does it include?
• Is there a rental programme, and what are its terms, including owner use and opting out?
• How long is the Marriott licence, and what happens if it ends?
• What is in the furniture package, and what does it cost to replace?
• Does the layout of my unit have a dimensioned plan, and is the area internal or gross?
• Are two- and three-bedroom Marriott apartments available, and at what prices?
• What does the unit’s view look like from the actual floor, and could a later phase block it?
• Which AIDA amenities will be open at handover, and what do owners pay to use them?

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a Marriott Residences apartment at AIDA cost?

On the developer’s price list, from OMR 139,200 (about $362,031) to OMR 193,570 (about $503,437) for a one-bedroom apartment of 698 to 963 sq ft.

Are the apartments furnished?

The brochure describes the Marriott Residences as fully furnished, with concierge, valet and à la carte services. Ask for the furniture package in writing.

How much extra does a sea view cost?

The five partial-sea-and-golf-view units are priced at OMR 213.5 to 215.9 per square foot, about 7.5% above a golf-view unit. A higher floor adds only about OMR 0.6 per square foot per floor.

Does a Marriott apartment qualify for Golden Residency?

Not on the units listed: the highest price is OMR 193,570, which is OMR 6,430 short of the OMR 200,000 single-property threshold. The Owner Visa has no minimum value.

Are there two- and three-bedroom Marriott apartments?

The brochure says there are, but our price list covers one-bedrooms only. Ask for the others separately.

What is the reservation amount?

OMR 4,000 (about $10,403) against every unit.

When will Marriott Residences be completed?

The price list gives no date. A June 2024 announcement said AIDA Phase 1 was set for completion in 2027, and earlier DarGlobal material phased completions between Q1 2027 and Q4 2028. Ask for the date for Building A and have it written into the agreement.

Request the Marriott Residences price list and availability

Sources: DarGlobal unit price list for Marriott Residences (AIDA) and the DarGlobal AIDA brochure, as supplied to UInvest; developer information at darglobal.co.uk/aida. Dollar conversions use the peg of 2.6008 and are rounded. Reading of unit codes, floor and view calculations and comparisons are our own. Areas, prices, availability and specifications are indicative and subject to the sale and purchase agreement. This page is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice.