A chairman of the Egyptian Mortgage Finance Fund Mostafa El Hayawan said that Egypt’s mortgage lending may increase to 8 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.4 billion) by the end of June next year
At a housing conference in Cairo, Egypt's Minister of Investment Mahmoud Mohieldin said that "Mortgage finance in the Arab world’s most populous country has increased from about 200 million pounds in 2005 to 4.43 billion pounds this year"
El Hayawan said that “By June 30 next year, this figure will be 8 billion”
Some analysts and real-estate developers such as Six of October Development & Investment estimate that the demand for housing units in Egypt to be around 500,000 a year. Egypt has a population of about 80 million.
The number of mortgage finance companies has increased from two in 2005 to 11 this year, with an average interest rate of 12.45 percent, Mohieldin told the conference in a speech. The average length of loans is 16.1 years, he added.
The World Bank has approved a $300 million loan to support mortgage lending in the Arab country. Egypt will use the funds to increase subsidies that the Mortgage Finance Fund offers for the country’s poor.
The state-run fund will offer subsidies for 10,000 units this year, and the cumulative number of such units may reach 65,000 in 2012, Mohieldin said. Households with a maximum income of 2,500 pounds a month qualify for subsidies, he said.
