Feasibility assessment · Prepared by WSL
A measured survey — including one wall the scan missed — and an open decision model across four routes. Every number below is an editable assumption.
01 — What is actually there
Drawn from the 3D scan of the unit, not from an agent's description. Areas are internal, walls excluded. Tap any room for its numbers.
The unit sits off a 19.3 m internal corridor serving roughly four units on the floor. The scan of the corridor found three unit doors plus an opening at each end; you have described four units, so one door was likely closed during the scan. Ours is the left-hand door, about 5.5 m in.
02 — Reading the plan
One correction had to be made to the survey before any of this was worth reading. It is set out first, because it changes the answer.
Polycam recorded the fifth-floor unit as one 76.3 m² hall. It is not. A wall runs east–west across it, and the scan caught only the eastern half of that line — the partition it labels as the Room 2 boundary, at y = 799.4, starting 6.2 m in from the west wall. The western continuation, from that point out to the exterior wall, was never captured.
We know it is the same line and not a new one because the wall traced on site lands within 0.07 m of the scan's own partition, and runs perfectly parallel to it. So the correction is not a redraw of the plan — it is one missing 5.3 m segment, shown in amber above.
The lucky part: both halves already have their own door onto the shared circulation, so the wall does not landlock anything. The unlucky part: the single open floor that made this unit interesting is 59 m², not 76 m² — and you have been told the wall is a light partition, so putting the 76 m² back is now a priced option rather than a wish. It is Route C below.
A second scan error, corrected on the same visit. Polycam recorded the 2.1 × 2.7 m opening in the north wall as a door. It is glazing, and the real entrance is the 0.8 m door off the shared hallway into the south of the circulation corridor. That single misread was also the source of the apparent conflict between the two scans — the unit read a 2.1 m entrance, the corridor read a 0.7 m one, and neither was wrong about its own door. Counting that opening as glass lifts external daylight from 6.0 m² to about 11.7 m², and moves the arrival point to the one room with no windows at all.
10.3 m across and 6.1 m deep, with a 2.1 × 2.7 m full-height glazed wall plus both corner windows — about 18% window to floor. It survives the correction as the reason to look at this space at all, and an open floor is far easier to let than four small ones.
The scan counted 8 desks, 8 cabinets, 11 chairs, a fridge and a sink in a dedicated 9.1 m² pantry. This is not a shell. A tenant could plausibly move in and work the same week, which is a lever on both rent and void period.
About 11.7 m² of external glazing over 113 m², or 10.3% — but it is almost all in one room. The north hall runs roughly 18% window to floor; the south room gets 5%, the corridor and the private room get nothing but a borrowed internal panel. Light is not this unit's problem. Its distribution is, and that is what caps a subdivided fit-out.
The entrance is a 0.8 m door off the shared hallway that opens directly into the windowless 18.4 m² corridor. A viewer meets that before they ever see the 59 m² hall or its full-height glazing. It is a cheap thing to fix with lighting and finishes, and an expensive thing to leave alone.
Room 2 is a T-shaped corridor, not usable area — 16% of the unit exists only to connect the other rooms. Any partitioning plan starts from 95 m², not 113 m², and adding internal corridors would make that worse.
03 — The four real options
Four routes fit this asset — the third only exists because the wall turned out to be a removable partition. Ranking updates live with the model below; the highlighted card is whichever route currently returns the most over five years.
Clean it, fix what is broken, photograph it and put it on the market furnished. No design work, no contractor, no closure.
Paint, flooring, lighting, ceiling and AC service, new entrance and signage. The layout stays exactly as it is — no walls move, so no permits and no long programme.
Everything in Route B, plus take out the 5.3 m partition the scan missed. Restores a single ~76 m² open floor and sells the unit as one big room rather than a good room and an awkward one.
Partition into private offices and desks, keep the pantry, and sell it by the seat month to month instead of by the year. Silsilah stops being a landlord and starts running a business.
04 — The decision model
Seeded with Jeddah market figures for Q1 2026 — sources are listed under the table. None of them are the asking price for this unit; they are starting points to argue with in the room.
Where the numbers land
—
| A · As-is | B · Refresh | C · Open up | D · Operate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up-front spend | — | — | — | — |
| Months before first income | — | — | — | — |
| Stabilised income, per year | — | — | — | — |
| Effective rate, SAR / m² / yr | — | — | — | — |
| Year one, net of spend | — | — | — | — |
| Payback on the spend | — | — | — | — |
| Five years, net of spend | — | — | — | — |
| Gain over Route A | baseline | — | — | — |
| WSL fee, if this route is taken | — | — | — | — |
How to read this. Figures are undiscounted cash, flat rent across five years, service charges and government fees excluded — deliberately, so the comparison between routes stays legible. Route C nets running costs off revenue; A and B do not, because a normal lease passes them to the tenant.
Route C's rent. The uplift over Route B is the only figure on this page with no market source behind it — it is a judgement that one 76 m² floor lets for more per m² than a 59 m² floor plus a 17 m² room. Set it equal to Route B's rent and the demolition correctly shows as pure cost.
Where the defaults come from. Jeddah Grade A offices averaged SAR 1,320/m²/yr and Grade B SAR 960/m²/yr in Q1 2026 (Grade A vacancy 6.0%, a tenant's market). A fifth-floor secondary-district unit of this age sits below Grade B, hence the SAR 550 as-is default. Saudi office fit-out runs SAR 700–2,200/m² for standard work and SAR 1,800–3,500/m² for high-quality Category B. Jeddah coworking desks average about SAR 1,185/month, with private offices from roughly SAR 1,245 per person.
05 — Before anything is committed
Each of these can move the numbers above by more than any assumption in the model. They are the agenda for the next meeting with Silsilah.
06 — Where we land
The two refresh routes finish so close together that the spreadsheet cannot separate them, and pretending otherwise would be false precision. Both beat leaving it alone, and both comfortably beat operating it. So the real question is not which number is bigger — it is whether this unit is worth more as one 76 m² open floor or as a 59 m² floor with a 17 m² room attached. That is a letting judgement, not an arithmetic one.
Our lean is still to keep the wall and take Route B, but the glazing correction narrows it. The case for keeping it: the 17 m² room is the only enclosed space besides the 9.3 m² private room, a tenant of this size almost always wants somewhere to hold a meeting, and demolition is a one-way door — it costs far more to put back than to take out. The case against, now stronger than it was: nearly all the daylight sits in the north hall, and the wall is precisely what stops it reaching the other half. Route C stays live because it can be decided after a tenant is in view rather than before, and that optionality is worth more than the SAR 17,000 the model separates them by.
The cheapest win is neither. You enter this unit through a 0.8 m door into a windowless corridor, and that is what a viewer judges it on. Lighting, finishes and a proper threshold cost a fraction of either route and improve every one of them.
What none of this rescues is the fit-out route. It has the highest ceiling on paper, but the model only reaches it at occupancy levels this location is unlikely to hold — and the daylight correction does not help, because the glazing is concentrated in exactly the room a fit-out would carve into windowless cells. It also converts a passive asset into a business with staff, churn and monthly risk. That is a decision Silsilah should take deliberately, not as a by-product of a spreadsheet.
Before recommending anything formally we want the answers below, and the one number missing from every model on this page: what the unit has actually been asking, and for how long it has failed to get it.
Walk the unit and the corridor. Settle the WC, the lift, the parking and the entrance in one hour.
Pull live comparables for fitted offices of this size in Ar Ruwais and the surrounding districts, and reset the rent assumptions to them.
Two contractor quotes against a defined scope, so Route B's cost stops being a per-m² estimate.
Scope, timeline and the fee structure modelled above, put in writing before any work begins.