You are here » Home » Telling Our Story
Success Story
USAID project cuts
real estate hassles for
owners and lenders
Real Estate Reform Enables Egyptians to Own Homes
Photo: Chemonics
A teller prepares for the grand opening
of the property registration office in the
Mokattam district of Cairo.
When Egyptians have
registered property titles,
they also have easier access
to credit and security in the
piece of land and home they
own.
A new real estate office in one of Cairo’s poorest slums is enabling more
residents to buy homes and protect their property rights. In Mokattam, a
district home to tens of thousands of zabaleen, or garbage collectors, the
state-of-the-art office is processing property registration quicker and more
accurately than ever before. Given the district’s high number of planned
and already existing residential development and the high concentration
of lower-income residents, USAID and the Government of Egypt selected
Mokattam to be the flagship registry office.
Through a USAID project, international land registration experts
implemented a fully-automated, operational model registry office in
Mokattam. The registry streamlined the management of files and
documents and allows for more efficiency as paper documents are now
automated through the different bureaus for electronic signatures. Specific
documents that require manual signatures, such as final deeds, are signed
then also scanned into the registry database for record keeping.
A decade ago, 90 percent of urban real estate and land were not formally
registered in Egypt. On average, 93 days were required to register a simple
transfer of property, and registration costs were equivalent to seven percent
of the property’s value.
The first major step in modernizing mortgage finance infrastructure in Egypt
was to create an electronic records system. This made records dramatically
easier for prospective buyers and mortgage lenders to search and
determine the right owner. Egyptian Financial Services (EFS) re-engineered
their business process to decrease registration time and then began training
their staff. EFS established a Training Development Center and developed
a five-week training program. With USAID support, about 140 staff members
were trained in the core curriculum, customer service, and IT.
“The training was excellent,” said Mona Masry, a senior technical
investigator in the Real Estate Publicity Department. ”It’s fantastic to have
all information available on one screen and not have to search through
stacks of paper records. It makes our work quicker and easier, and this will
mean better services for the public.”
The technical assistance has created a demand-driven property registration
environment in Mokattam. Also, the incidence of errors has been
signifi cantly reduced, while protection of property records and ownership
information has increased markedly.
The World Bank’s Doing Business 2008 report, comparing regulation
of 178 countries’ economies in the period between April 2006 and June
2007, named Egypt the top economic reformer in the region and the world,
highlighting property registration as a key factor. According to the report,
simplification of administrative procedures for property registration ensured
Egypt’s spot among the top 10 reformers around the world. The average
number of days to register property in Egypt dropped from 193 in 2007 to
74 in 2008. The project has improved the livelihoods of many Egyptians by
formalizing their property rights, facilitating mortgage finance, and enabling
more Egyptians to own their home.
Print-friendly version of this page (533kb - PDF)
Click here for high-res photo
Back to Top ^
|
RSS Feed for Recent Telling Our Story Updates
