Taqah Long Beach Boutique, Taqah, Salalah, Oman

Taqah Long Beach Boutique, Taqah — 24 sea-view apartments near Salalah, Oman

Taqah Long Beach Boutique is a 24-residence low-rise on the Dhofar coast at Taqah, about 31 km east of Salalah. The developer is Al Zaid Real Estate & Development, trading here as AZD. It is a single curved building of four residential floors over a ground level, finished in white and sand-toned panels, with a 200 m² pool deck and bar on the roof. Completion is given as Q3 2026 — the quarter now ending. Of the 24 residences, 2 remain available, priced from $224,700.

This is the smallest and, per square foot, the cheapest of Al Zaid’s Taqah buildings, and it is the only one of them that gives you a separate bedroom rather than a single room. It is also the one whose paperwork needs the most checking before you sign anything. The brochure never states what form of ownership you are buying, two of its headline construction figures cannot both describe this building, and six of the eight amenities it advertises are labelled as being somewhere else. None of that makes it a bad building — the renders show a genuinely handsome one — but all of it belongs in front of you before a deposit does.

Key facts

Tenure: the question the brochure does not answer

Start here, because it is the one thing that changes what the asset is.

The Taqah Long Beach Boutique brochure contains a panel headed “TLB.B Residence Tabulation and Fact”. It lists the unit count, the rooftop area and the construction area. It says nothing at all about ownership. The sales sheet is equally silent. Neither document uses the word freehold, leasehold, usufruct or title.

That silence is worth reading against the same developer’s neighbouring project. The Sea Front Residences stands 2.3 km along the same beach, and the equivalent panel in its brochure opens with a line this one omits: “99 years leasehold renewable for life”. Same developer, same town, same document template — and in the sister project that template carries a leasehold declaration.

The legal geography points the same way. Foreign freehold in Oman flows from Sultani Decree 12/2006, which permits non-citizen ownership inside approved Integrated Tourism Complexes. Dhofar’s established ITC is Hawana Salalah, the Muriya development west of Salalah city. We have found no ITC designation for Taqah, which is a separate wilayat roughly 31 km to the east. Separately, Decree 29/2018 lists regions closed to non-citizen ownership, and published reviews describe most of Dhofar outside Salalah as falling under those restrictions.

We are not asserting that this building is leasehold. We are saying the developer has not told buyers what it is, that its sister building 2.3 km away is expressly leasehold, and that the location makes freehold unlikely. Get the instrument named in writing before you pay anything beyond a refundable deposit, and have an independent Omani lawyer confirm how it is registered with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning. Ask specifically: is this freehold or leasehold; if leasehold, for how long, what does renewal cost and who grants it; and what residence permit, if any, does the purchase create? Do not accept a general assurance that “you get residency” — the Golden Residency route requires ITC freehold, and OMR 86,400 would not reach its threshold even inside an ITC.

If freehold with a residence permit is the requirement, our ITC listings answer it directly: Alef Qurum Residence, Telal Al Qurm and Al Mouj in Muscat, and Amazi at Hawana Salalah within Dhofar itself.

The residences

The building holds 24 apartments across four residential floors — six per floor. All are handed over finished, with built-in appliances and a “Smart Home” system, behind floor-to-ceiling glazing with a balcony to every unit.

They are not studios

The brochure page is headed “Types of Flats” and calls both variants “Studio Type A 1+1”. Those two descriptions contradict each other. A studio is a single room; 1+1 is the Turkish convention for one bedroom plus one living room, which is a one-bedroom apartment. The renders settle it — they show a living and dining area separated from a bed by a full-height timber partition and a doorway, which is a wall, not a zone.

This matters commercially rather than semantically, and it matters in the buyer’s favour. At 104–105 m² these are nearly twice the size of the 56 m² studios at the sister Sea Front Residences, and they have a separate bedroom. Anyone comparing “Taqah studios” across the developer’s projects on price alone is comparing two quite different products. Note also that both variants carry the same type letter — “Type A” is used for both the 104 m² and the 105 m² plan — so the type name alone will not identify which one you are being sold.

No floor plans are published

Unlike the Sea Front brochure, which prints four dimensioned layouts, the Boutique brochure’s “Types of Flats” page carries no floor plans at all — only two interior renders. There is therefore no published document showing room dimensions, the balcony depth, or how much of the 104–105 m² gross figure is enclosed and how much is terrace.

That last point is not hypothetical. On the developer’s Sea Front plans, the terrace accounts for a large share of the stated gross area — close to half on the larger types. If the same drawing convention applies here, a “105 m²” apartment may enclose appreciably less than 105 m². Ask for the dimensioned floor plan and for both figures — gross and enclosed — for the specific unit you are offered.

A size range that does not reconcile

Three sets of numbers are in circulation and no two agree:

The sheet’s 915 sq ft floor is 200 sq ft smaller than any published type. Its “from 1,152 sq ft” is larger than the biggest published type, which is impossible for a starting size. And its 1,163 sq ft ceiling matches nothing at all. With only two apartments left, this is easily resolved by asking for the measured area of each — but it does have to be asked.

Pricing

All conversions use 1 OMR = 2.6008 USD. Set against the rest of our Oman coverage, the figure is more reasonable than the location alone would suggest:

Two readings follow. First, the Boutique is about 10% cheaper per square foot than the Sea Front studios down the beach while giving you a separate bedroom — on floor area it is the better-value of the two Taqah buildings by a clear margin. Second, it still sits at central-Muscat pricing without central-Muscat title, and a buyer should make that trade deliberately rather than by assuming a beachfront address in Dhofar prices the way a beachfront address in the capital does.

The price has come down, not up

The sales sheet records a May 2025 starting price of OMR 89,000, or about $231,471, against today’s $224,700, or OMR 86,395. In riyal terms that is a fall of roughly 2.9% over about fifteen months.

That is unusual and it cuts both ways. A project 92% sold and weeks from completion is not normally discounting, so the softening may simply reflect which two units are left rather than a repricing of the whole building — end units, lower floors and poorer aspects are typically last to go. It is a fair question to put directly: are these two apartments cheaper because the market moved, or because they are the two nobody wanted? Ask which floor each is on and which way each faces before treating the price as a bargain.

The service charge is not published

The sales sheet lists the service charge as “to be specified”. For a building at practical completion, that is late. This is a recurring cost for the life of the ownership, on a building carrying a rooftop pool, a bar, landscaped gardens, a lift, 24-hour security and a shuttle service across only 24 apartments — a small number of units to spread fixed running costs over.

For scale, the sister Sea Front Residences charges a flat OMR 300 per year, which works out at 5.36 OMR/m² on its 56 m² studios; Alef Qurum Residence charges 5.00 OMR/m² and Telal Al Qurm 4.50 OMR/m². Those are comparators, not this building’s rate — the point is that on a 105 m² apartment each riyal per square metre is worth about OMR 105 a year, so the difference between a 3.00 and a 5.00 rate is roughly OMR 210 annually. Do not sign without the figure and without knowing whether it is fixed, for how long, and what it covers.

The payment plan has run out of runway

The published terms are 50% on reservation, with the balance in monthly instalments until the project is completed. That is a genuinely buyer-friendly structure — while the project is under construction.

Completion is stated as Q3 2026, and the price list itself is dated 25 August 2026. The instalment window is therefore all but closed: a buyer signing now has very little time left over which to spread the remaining 50%, and may in practice be facing something close to full payment on or near handover. Ask what the payment schedule actually looks like for a purchase today, in dates and amounts, rather than assuming the advertised plan still applies. If a mortgage is needed, note that the sheet carries no financing information at all; Omani banks lend to non-residents at roughly 70% loan-to-value and around 6.00% a year, with benchmarks published by the Central Bank of Oman, but lending against an undeclared or leasehold interest is materially harder to arrange.

Two construction figures that cannot both be right

The brochure’s facts panel gives the building’s size twice, and the two numbers are irreconcilable:

Twenty-four apartments of 104–105 m² is roughly 2,500 m² of saleable area; adding a lobby, cores, plant, parking and the rooftop deck, a building of this shape plausibly lands somewhere in the low thousands of square metres. Neither printed figure is anywhere near that.

The 29,048 m² figure is the more revealing of the two, because it is not a random error — it is the right order of magnitude for a much larger scheme. Spread across the sister development Taqah Long Beach, which runs to 229 residences, it works out at a very ordinary 127 m² per unit. The overwhelmingly likely explanation is that the panel was copied from the bigger project’s deck and the unit count changed while the area did not. That is a documentation failure rather than a construction one, but it is the kind that should make you verify every other number in the same document independently.

Where the amenities actually are

This is the finding most likely to change what a buyer thinks they are getting, and it is visible on the face of the brochure.

The features page lists eight items. Six of them are qualified with the words “at TLB” — TLB being Taqah Long Beach, the developer’s larger neighbouring project, not this building:

The sales sheet, by contrast, states flatly that “the complex offers a secure, gated environment, a shuttle service, a private mini-market, and a nursery. Residents also have access to a well-equipped gym and a spa” — presenting all of them as facilities of this building. The developer’s own document does not support that reading.

Set against this, the brochure’s own tabulation credits the Boutique with a 200 m² rooftop pool and sitting area, and the renders unambiguously show a pool, a bar and a covered lounge on this building’s roof. So the position appears to be: the pool deck and bar are yours; the gym, spa, restaurant, nursery, cafés and mini-market are shared facilities at the larger development. That is a perfectly normal arrangement, and for a 24-unit building it is arguably the only way to offer that range of facilities at all. But it is a different proposition from a self-contained building, and it raises questions the documents do not answer: how far is the walk, is access included in the service charge or charged separately, and is that access contractual or merely current practice? A residual oddity in the same text — an invitation to “do business in our roomy conference spaces”, in a 24-apartment building — points the same way, toward copy written for the larger scheme.

Location: Taqah, and a location page that was not updated

The Plus Code decodes to 17.0334° N, 54.3857° E, on the shore about 1.8 km west of Taqah town and 2.3 km west of the developer’s Sea Front Residences along the same beach. Taqah is a Dhofari fishing town with a restored 19th-century castle, set between the sea and the Dhofar mountains. Our measurements from the site:

Being 2.3 km further west than the Sea Front, this site is slightly closer to Salalah and its airport and slightly further from the eastern landmarks. The sheet’s own drive times — 25 minutes to central Salalah, about 30 minutes to the airport — are consistent with that.

The brochure’s location page, however, is the Sea Front’s location page unchanged. It prints the same six distances and the same six stock photographs that appear in the sister project’s deck, without adjusting for a site 2.3 km away:

The Hawana error is the same one printed in the Sea Front brochure, and it is self-evidently wrong on its own page: a destination on the far side of Salalah cannot be a third of the distance to Salalah. If proximity to Hawana matters to you, budget for roughly 40 km. None of this changes the quality of the building — but a location page that was not re-measured for the location it describes is another reason to verify rather than assume.

Why the Salalah region draws buyers

Dhofar is unlike anywhere else on the Arabian Peninsula. From roughly June to September the khareef — the Indian Ocean monsoon — turns the mountains behind Salalah green, drops temperatures into the low twenties and brings hundreds of thousands of Gulf visitors escaping the summer heat. That seasonal phenomenon drives the regional property market and explains why a sea-view apartment here has a short-let argument an identical apartment in mainland Oman does not.

The immediate surroundings are unusually rich in heritage. Sumhuram at Khor Rori, 5.7 km east, forms part of the UNESCO “Land of Frankincense” inscription — the ruins of a third-century-BC port from which frankincense left for the ancient world. Wadi Darbat, inland, fills with waterfalls during and after the khareef. Mirbat, half an hour east, keeps its old merchant houses and a well-known diving coast. Regional tourism information is published by Experience Oman and policy by the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism.

The building

Architecturally this is the more restrained of the developer’s two Taqah buildings, and to our eye the better resolved. Where the Sea Front is all sweeping horizontal slabs, the Boutique is a compact rectangular block whose floor plates curve gently at the corners, wrapped in continuous glass-balustraded balconies. The palette is white and sand-toned panelling, broken by vertical timber fins that run the full height of the elevation and give the facade a rhythm the flat white of its sister lacks. The ground floor is glazed behind tall pointed arches — a nod to Omani detailing that recurs across the developer’s work. At night, concealed lighting picks out the underside of every slab.

Two things stand out. The 200 m² rooftop across only 24 apartments is a genuinely generous ratio — this is the amenity the building actually owns, and it is not competing with hundreds of neighbours for a sunlounger. And the prayer room is a small but telling inclusion, absent from the Sea Front’s list and a signal that the building is designed for residents rather than purely for seasonal lets.

The developer

Al Zaid Real Estate & Development operates across the full development cycle — concept, design, construction, finishing and subsequent property management. Beyond Oman the company lists offices in Kuwait, Lebanon, the Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey and Australia, which explains why its Taqah projects surface on European brokerage platforms.

Its portfolio is concentrated on this one stretch of coast: Taqah Long Beach, Taqah Long Beach Boutique, Taqah Blue Beach, Noah Residence, Lamar Residences and The Sea Front Residences. That concentration cuts both ways. It means real knowledge of the site and a product the company has built repeatedly — and the Boutique’s dependence on Taqah Long Beach’s facilities only works because the developer owns both. But it also means several competing schemes from one developer in one small town: Taqah Long Beach alone runs to 229 residences, and the Sea Front adds 94. Anyone buying for resale or short-let should ask how many further units Al Zaid intends to release in Taqah and over what period, because that is the supply this apartment will be competing against.

The sales sheet gives no founding year and no completed-project count. Standard checks apply, and the missing tenure declaration makes them more important than usual: confirm which regulated escrow account holds buyer funds, ask to walk through a completed Al Zaid building in Taqah — with the project at practical completion this one should itself be viewable — and read the delay-compensation clause before signing.

How it compares

The closest comparison is the developer’s own Sea Front Residences, and the two are genuinely different buys. The Sea Front sits directly on the sand, hands over fully furnished, states its tenure plainly, and completes in late 2027. The Boutique is finished now, gives you nearly double the floor area and a separate bedroom for a lower price per square foot, and has a 200 m² roof deck shared among only 24 households — but it is set back from the beach, it does not say what you are buying, and its service charge is unpublished. For tenure clarity and a furnished, beach-adjacent short-let unit, the Sea Front. For space, a real bedroom and immediate occupation, this — provided the title question is answered in writing first. Within Dhofar, the freehold alternative in either case is Amazi at Hawana Salalah, and there are further Salalah options in Lubana Island and the Muriya land plots.

Rental outlook

The letting case rests almost entirely on khareef seasonality. From June to September Dhofar fills with Gulf visitors and short-let rates in the Salalah area rise sharply. A finished, appliance-fitted one-bedroom with a sea view, a rooftop pool and a shuttle service is well matched to that demand, and being complete now means an owner can be in the market for the 2027 season without waiting on construction.

Three cautions. First, the season is short: a market that concentrates demand into roughly a quarter of the year produces a very different annual yield from one with even occupancy, and the service charge — whatever it turns out to be — runs for twelve months regardless. Second, supply in one small town is rising: 24 apartments here, 94 studios at the Sea Front and 229 at Taqah Long Beach is a substantial quantity of comparable short-let stock from a single developer entering the same seasonal window. Third, an undeclared or leasehold interest complicates both financing and resale, which affects the exit as much as the income. Against that, the larger unit size is a genuine advantage for families, who are the bulk of the khareef market and for whom a separate bedroom is not a luxury. Model net rent after service charge, management, voids and seasonality rather than from peak nightly rates. Oman levies no personal income tax on rent; official statistics are published by the National Centre for Statistics and Information and investor incentives by Invest Oman.

Why Oman

Oman makes a quieter proposition than its Gulf neighbours, and Dhofar is its quietest part. The Sultanate ranks among the safest countries in the world on Numbeo‘s indices, living costs run below neighbouring Gulf states, and there is no personal income tax on rental earnings. Salalah International Airport connects the region to the Gulf and to seasonal international routes. General country information is published at oman.om and current affairs by the Times of Oman.

Questions to ask before reserving

• Tenure, first and in writing: Is this freehold or leasehold? The brochure does not say, and the same developer’s Sea Front brochure says 99-year leasehold. If leasehold: how long, what does renewal cost, who grants it?
• Residency: What permit, if any, does this purchase create? Golden Residency requires ITC freehold and OMR 200,000 — this is about OMR 86,400 and Taqah has no ITC status identified.
• Which unit, exactly: Only two remain. Which floor, which aspect, and is it the 104 m² or the 105 m² plan? Both are called “Type A”.
• Floor plan and areas: No plans are published. Ask for the dimensioned drawing and for gross and enclosed areas — the developer’s Sea Front plans put a large share of gross area in the terrace.
• Why is it cheaper than in May 2025? Market softening, or the last two units being the least desirable?
• Service charge: Listed as “to be specified”. Get the number, whether it is fixed and for how long, and what it covers across 24 apartments.
• Amenity access: The gym, spa, restaurant, nursery, cafés and mini market are printed as being “at TLB”, the neighbouring development. Is access contractual, is it included in the service charge, and how far is it?
• Payment schedule: The plan is 50% plus instalments to completion, but completion is this quarter. What are the actual dates and amounts for a purchase today?
• Financing: Will an Omani bank lend against this interest, and on what terms? The sheet carries no mortgage information.
• The construction figures: The brochure prints both 318 m² and 29,048 m² for a 24-apartment building. What is the actual gross built area, and which other figures in the document came from the larger project?
• Escrow and delay: Which regulated account holds buyer funds, and what compensation applies if handover slips past Q3 2026?
• Developer pipeline: How many further units will Al Zaid release in Taqah, and when?

Enquire about Taqah Long Beach Boutique

UInvest Group works directly with developers across Oman, and we assess a project’s weaknesses as carefully as its strengths. On Taqah Long Beach Boutique we can obtain current availability on the two remaining apartments, the floor, aspect and measured area of each in Omani riyals, the payment schedule that actually applies at this stage of the build, the service-charge figure the sheet leaves open, and — most importantly — written confirmation of the exact legal instrument, its renewal terms, and what residence permit it creates, if any.

If the undeclared tenure is the sticking point, the ITC-status alternative within Dhofar is Amazi at Hawana Salalah, and the wider freehold portfolio runs from central Muscat and Telal Al Qurm to the marina communities of Al Mouj and Barr Al Jissah and the branded beachfront of the Mandarin Oriental. If it is not, the building next door — The Sea Front Residences — is the natural comparison to put beside it.