Last week in Dubai, I spent two days listening to investors, developers, operators, and planners talk about cities, mixed-use, capital, and “the future.”
And almost every other conversation eventually landed on Egypt. (maybe because i prompted that) and people are genuinely confused by it. In a good way & and in a frustrating way.
Everyone knows the headline numbers. We’re around 110+ million people. We add roughly 1.5 million people every year (or as i always say, we give birth to Bahrain every year). We’ve built entire cities in less than 15 years.
We survived 3 Currency major devaluations, 2 revolutions, a global pandemic, and your ongoing regional wars.
And yet real estate still kept moving. that looks insane on paper, barely believable, something must be wrong. But as my dad always says ” العقار يمرض ولا بموت”
During the mixed-use design and ops panel with Alessio Costantino from Lead8 , we kept coming back to one idea:
Design matters. Technology helps and operations decide everything.
If you can’t adapt fast on the ground, no masterplan saves you.
And honestly, Egypt is built on adaptation.
We operate in chaos. We improvise (الجيش قلنا اتصرف).
We fix things live. We move on.
That’s why projects (and humans) survive here.
But that strength is also our weakness when it comes to foreign investment.
In the roundtable on FDI, Mohamed Kamal said something quite brutal that stuck with me:
Many investors come. Do one project. Potentially make money. Then leave.
They don’t double down.
Not because Egypt isn’t profitable. Because Egypt is exhausting.
Samer Dinnawi summed it up even more clearly:
Currency risk. Unclear rules. Changing regulations. Long approvals.
No predictable playbook.
To make serious money in Egypt, you need insider knowledge.
Who to talk to. When to move. When to wait. Which rule matters. Which rule doesn’t.
That’s normal for us.
For institutional money, it’s a red flag.
So what happens?
“Safe” money goes to Dubai.
Boring. Predictable (in a good way). Lower returns. Lower stress.
High-risk money goes to Saudi.
Big state-backed projects.
Clear direction. Massive upside.
And Egypt sits in the middle.
Huge market. Real demand. Real growth.
But hard to read from outside.
Here’s the conclusion I came to, Egypt doesn’t need more investors. It needs better communication, organization and transparency.
We have opportunity everywhere, but on paper, none of it makes sense.
On paper, it looks risky.
In reality, people who understand the system do very well (trust me I know).
That gap is the problem.
We don’t explain Egypt in a language global capital understands.
If we can translate local knowledge into clear, honest, usable information, money will come.
At the risk of tooting my own marketing horn “Egyptians need to market their real estate better, and I think I know just the person to do it”
… yes its me.
