If you look back at the archives from 2023 or 2024, the headlines were dominated by inflation, repricing, and the struggle to secure materials. 2025 was different. It was the year the real estate sector fully executed a strategic pivot long in the works by increasingly looking outside the country for projects and buyers. Faced with an affordability ceiling at home and a thirst for hard currency, Egypt’s real estate giants spent the last twelve months aggressively diversifying their risk. The result was a year defined by a dual export strategy: selling Egyptian homes to the world, and building new ones outside of Egypt.

All roads lead to east

The expansion of Egyptian companies into the Gulf and a few other Arab nations went from a trend into a stampede this year. Instead of just Egyptian contractors supporting projects abroad, Egyptian developers began to establish their own footprints with their own badged projects. With a sizable amount of luxury housing stock already in the works in Egypt, projects abroad open up additional capital flows — especially in FX.

Egypt’s largest developer Talaat Moustafa Group played a big role in this push, with its now under-constructionUSD 17.3 bn Benan City project in Saudi Arabia. It also recently inaugurated two large-scale developments in Oman expected to bring in USD 4.7 bn, and a USD 10 bn project in Iraq.

But nearly all the major players got involved, including Mountain View. Its Saudi arm made significant strides this year on the USD 320 mn One Mountain View project in Riyadh and the USD 600 mn Al Fursan project, launched in partnership with the Kingdom’s National Housing Company. Hassan Allam Holding also looked east through its development arm Grova Developments, inking an agreement for a SAR 3.3 bn integrated project in Riyadh, while Ora Developers began enabling works on its large-scale Bayn project in Abu Dhabi.

The message? Local developers are becoming an endangered species — to survive at the top of the food chain in 2025, one must be a regional player.

But the traffic wasn’t one-way

The distinction between a local and a regional project effectively vanished with the accelerated development of Ras El Hekma. The arrival of the UAE’s Modon as a top-tier competitor changed the competitive landscape overnight. Its entry into the top sales rankings for the first nine months of the year — recording EGP 75 bn in sales — proved that the biggest projects in Egypt are now regionally funded. This has forced local incumbents to up their game in terms of delivery speed and product finish to compete with well-capitalized newcomers that aren’t facing the same liquidity constraints.

USD 1.5 bn — that’s the amount of property exports that stacked up over the year

The value of property exports — sales to non-residents — in 2025 was up 200% from the USD 500 mn recorded the year prior, according to the Real Estate Development Chamber. This shift wasn’t just about sales volume; it was a fundamental change in the currency mix of the nation’s top developers. With local purchasing power strained by cumulative inflation, companies prioritized buyers who paid in USD or fresh flows of foreign-sourced capital. This liquidity shield allowed the top-tier players to partly decouple themselves from the local credit squeeze that hampered smaller competitors.

Egypt also made global headlines with several big-ticket projects

The Ras El Hekma effect of 2024 proved to be a blueprint, not a one-off. In November 2025, the government signed a USD 29.7 bn agreement with Qatari Diar to develop 4.9k feddans in the Alam El Roum area of Matrouh. Simultaneously, the Red Sea saw its own massive pivot with Emaar Misr signing an EGP 900 bn (USD 18.6 bn) agreement for the Marassi Red Sea complex near Hurghada.

An ambitious project to divert a branch of the Nile to build a EGP 1.5 tn new desert city also made global headlines. Private sector developers Palm Hills, Mountain View, and Nations of Sky inked a partnership and development contract for the Jirian project in June with the state, represented by the Egyptian Armed Forces-linked Mostakbal Misr Agency for Sustainable Development. The project will see 6.8 sq km reclaimed from the desert to house 20k residential units.

Away from grand announcements, important things happened on the policy front

The decades-old Old Rent system underwent its most radical structural change in 2025 following a landmark ruling. Long criticized for freezing rental values at nominal rates (sometimes as low as a few EGPs) and granting indefinite tenure to tenants and their heirs, the system had effectively locked bns of EGP in dead capital and caused the widespread decay of historic urban centers. But in August, the government moved to fully liberalize the market through a time-bound transition.

The government finally abolished the 5% schedule tax on construction in June, replacing it with the standard 14% VAT. To the casual observer, a rate hike sounds like bad news. But for every CFO in the construction sector, this was the relief they had been begging for. The old 5% tax was a non-deductible cost that ate directly into margins. The move to the standard VAT system allows contractors to deduct input taxes. For a sector that has been plagued by rising material costs, this technical tweak improved cashflow and helped formalize the supply chain, allowing contractors to recover funds used to be lost to the treasury.

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