Aqar Exit is an Egyptian platform, launched in August 2026, for people who bought a property on an instalment plan and want to get out of the contract. It matches them with a buyer who takes over the contract through an official assignment approved by the developer. The seller gets back what they have paid so far, and the new buyer takes the unit at the original contract price and carries on with the remaining instalments. The founder and CEO is Mahmoud Ammar.

Does the developer have to approve an assignment?

In practice, yes. Aqar Exit says its transfers are official developer-approved assignments rather than powers of attorney or private promises, which gives the new buyer formal standing with the developer. That is not a guarantee on its own: a buyer should still check the rights being transferred, what is still owed and how far the project has actually got. Developers set their own conditions. Some charge a percentage of the unit price, some charge a fixed amount, and some do not allow assignment at all during certain periods of the contract. Check your own contract and ask the developer in writing before listing.

Does Aqar Exit prove there is a real estate bubble in Egypt?

No, and it does not prove there isn't one either. The platform had 6,437 units listed by mid-September, according to its founder. For a rough sense of scale, the ten largest developers alone sold about 39,000 units in just the first half of 2026, and the market has sold far more than that over the years these contracts were signed in. So it is a small slice of the market. But it is a very visible pocket of pressure: 88.1% of the cases in its first index came within the first two years of the contract.

Can developers legally charge an assignment fee in Egypt?

This is disputed. Article 15 of Consumer Protection Law 181 of 2018 says a contract may not include a clause entitling the seller to a percentage, fee or commission from the price of the buyer's disposal of the unit, or in consideration of that disposal, and that any such clause is void. Developers present their charges as administrative fees, and a lawyer quoted in the Egyptian press said that label does not settle the question. We have not found a court ruling that settles it either way. This is not legal advice. If the fee decides whether a transfer makes sense, get a lawyer to read your contract.

Aqar Exit Explained: How Egypt's Contract-Exit Platform Works and What It Means for the Market

In August 2026, a platform went live in Egypt and started publishing something the property market had only ever talked about in private: running numbers on how many instalment buyers want out, at least among the people who come to it.

The platform is Aqar Exit. In its first four weeks, by its own figures, more than 7,000 sellers opened files on units it values at over EGP 72 billion. By mid-September its founder was talking about EGP 93 billion. Within days, the biggest developer in the country was on television saying the market was fine, and a TV host was asking the government to publish real data.

This article covers what Aqar Exit is, how a transfer actually works, what the arithmetic looks like for a real unit, what its data does and does not show, and what it changes for the people who sell property.

What Aqar Exit is

Aqar Exit is an Egyptian platform for assigning instalment contracts. Its founder and CEO is Mahmoud Ammar, and its site lists it as powered by Aqora for Real Estate and Ammar Group.

The model rests on one rule: no overprice.

The seller is someone who bought a unit, usually off-plan, on an instalment plan and cannot or does not want to keep paying. They get back what they have paid so far, in cash, when the transfer completes.
The buyer takes the unit at the original contract price and carries on with the remaining instalment schedule.
The seller pays no commission. The buyer pays a success fee of 1.25% of the contract value, and only if the transfer completes.
The transfer is an official assignment approved by the developer. The platform stresses that it does not do powers of attorney or private promises.

The platform says it checks each contract and payment receipt against the documents, marks figures as either document-verified or estimated, assigns a case manager to each transfer, and offers a "silent exit" for sellers who do not want their unit listed publicly. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are listed on its site as coming soon.

Ammar's own framing at launch was that the platform exists "primarily to support distressed property buyers, not to create a new market or compete with developers."

How a transfer works

For the seller:

Enter the contract details. An account is created.
Upload the contract and payment receipts.
The platform checks the figures against the documents.
It matches the unit with a buyer whose budget fits.
A case manager takes both sides through the developer's assignment process until the seller is paid.

For the buyer:

Register a budget: how much cash you have, and what monthly instalment you can carry.
Receive units that fit.
Review the verified contract, what has been paid and what remains.
Complete the developer-approved assignment.
Continue paying the original schedule at the original price.

The arithmetic, with one unit

The numbers below are illustrative, to show the mechanics. They are not from any listing.

A buyer signed in 2024 for a unit at a contract price of EGP 5,000,000. So far they have paid EGP 1,250,000 in down payment and instalments. Similar units are now being offered at around EGP 6,500,000. The remaining EGP 3,750,000 in instalments has become too heavy.

There are three common routes.

Option 1: cancel with the developer. What happens depends on the contract, the law and whatever settlement the developer agrees to. Ammar has said that buyers who cancel typically lose around 15% of the total unit price and get the rest back in instalments rather than in one payment. On this unit, 15% of the contract price is EGP 750,000, which would leave EGP 500,000 to come back slowly. Treat the 15% as the founder's figure, not a rule. Read your own cancellation clause.

Option 2: assign the contract through Aqar Exit. Under the platform's model, the seller gets EGP 1,250,000 back in cash if and when the transfer completes, before any costs that land on the seller's side. The buyer pays that EGP 1,250,000, plus the platform's 1.25% fee of EGP 62,500, and takes over the remaining EGP 3,750,000 in instalments. On top of that sits whatever the developer charges to approve the assignment, which is covered below and can be large. Who pays it is something to settle before anyone signs.

Option 3: find a buyer privately, through a broker or on your own. This still needs the developer's assignment, and the price is whatever the two sides agree. Often that means what the seller paid plus an overprice for the price rise, but it can be less. A premium can work. It depends on finding a buyer with enough cash to pay it on top, which, as the data below suggests, is the scarce thing in this market.

Here is the part that matters. In Option 2 the buyer takes the unit at about EGP 1,500,000 below what similar units are being asked for today. That is an asking-price gap before fees, not a guaranteed profit: after the platform fee and, say, a 10% developer fee paid by the buyer, it shrinks to about EGP 937,500. Either way, most of the price rise moves from the seller to the buyer. The seller swaps a paper profit for certainty and cash now.

That is also why reports describe units on the platform as priced 20% to 35% "below market". Most of that gap is not a discount anyone chose. It is the distance between an old contract price and what similar units cost today. (Some sellers do go further: the index says 31.3% were willing to give up part of their proceeds to get out faster.)

The platform's own index shows the same thing at scale: units listed in its first four weeks had an estimated market value of EGP 72.2 billion against original contract values of EGP 53.6 billion. That is a gap of EGP 18.6 billion, about 26% below estimated market value, right inside the range the reports quote. The index separately cites about EGP 16 billion in unrealised gains; the coverage we found does not explain the difference between the two figures. In the index's words, paper gains do not pay the instalments.

What the first month of data shows

Aqar Exit published what it calls Egypt's first index of the property assignment market, covering 8 August to 5 September 2026:

Measure	Figure
Assignment files opened	9,839
Individual sellers	7,225
Units listed or under review	5,045
Estimated market value of those units	EGP 72.2 billion
Original contract value	EGP 53.6 billion
Purchase requests	31,992, from 17,268 buyers
Median time to first purchase request	14.6 hours
Units with a request within 48 hours	69.1%
Cases within two years of signing (where contract age was known)	88.1%
Cases involving overdue instalments (where payment status was known)	20.7%

Three findings in there are worth more than the headline value.

On the platform, demand sits at the bottom of the price range. Units below EGP 3 million averaged 9.5 purchase requests each. Units above EGP 20 million averaged 1.6. By mid-September Ammar was describing the same split as 8 to 9 requests per unit under EGP 4 million against 1 to 3 above EGP 10 million.

The typical buyer on the platform has about EGP 1 million in cash and says they can carry about EGP 50,000 a month. Those are the index's medians, reported by the platform's own buyers. It is one audience, not the whole country, but it is a more honest picture of that segment's demand than any launch brochure.

The pressure shows early. The index calls it the "second-year pressure point": among cases where the contract's age was known, 88.1% were within two years of signing. That shows sellers are concentrated in recent contracts; it does not prove that year two is when most contracts fail. The index does not explain why. Our reading: that is roughly when a down payment is behind the buyer, the instalments are fully running, and the price rise that made the purchase feel clever has not yet turned into cash.

By 13 September, Ammar said the platform had 6,437 units worth about EGP 93 billion and around 32,000 purchase requests.

Read the numbers carefully

These figures are genuinely useful. They also need four caveats, and it would be dishonest to repeat them without saying so.

The platform publishes them itself. They are not audited or independently checked.
"Market value" is the platform's own estimate, not a sale price.
A purchase request is not a completed transfer. None of the coverage we reviewed gave a count of completed assignments. Tens of thousands of requests against a few thousand units tells you about interest, not closings.
Most sellers were not overdue. Only 20.7% of cases with known payment status involved overdue instalments. That does not prove the rest are comfortable. It does mean most of them are trying to get out before they fall behind, not after.

That last point is the one most commentary has missed, and it matters for the debate that followed.

Bubble, or back to normal?

The platform's numbers turned into a national argument within a fortnight.

Hisham Talaat Moustafa, head of Talaat Moustafa Group, speaking on MBC Masr's Al-Hekaya, said the market is running at normal rates and that the boom of 2023 and the first half of 2024 was the exception, driven by people buying to protect their money from inflation. He put collections at 99.6% (Al Borsa News reported that as his own group's rate; other outlets reported it as the big developers' rate generally), and dismissed the idea of a bubble. He described the units on the platform as an insignificant share of total sales.

Mahmoud Ammar argued the real problem is purchasing power: prices have risen faster than buyers' ability to pay.

Lamees El-Hadidi called on the government to publish an official property database covering market size, active developers, unsold stock and distressed units. Former deputy housing minister Ahmed Adel Darwish said the market is not collapsing but faces structural problems that need urgent intervention.

Our reading is that both sides are describing real things, and they do not contradict each other.

The ten largest developers sold about 39,000 units in the first half of 2026 alone. The platform's few thousand units built up from contracts signed over several years, so the two numbers are not a clean ratio, but the scale is clear: Aqar Exit is not the market. At the same time, those developers' sales value rose 2.9% while the number of units sold fell about 5%, which is exactly what you would expect if higher prices are doing the work that more buyers used to do.

And a 99.6% collection rate is entirely compatible with a long queue of people looking for the exit. Most sellers on the platform were not overdue when they listed. Many are paying and looking for a way out. These are not the same datasets or necessarily the same people, so neither number disproves the other; they describe two things that can be true at once for a long time.

The assignment-fee fight it has exposed

Aqar Exit's promise is that a seller gets back what they paid. The biggest obstacle to that promise is not the platform. It is the developer's assignment fee.

Lawyers quoted in the Egyptian financial press this month put typical developer assignment fees at 5% to 10% of the unit price, with some companies charging 15%. Others charge a fixed amount. Some developers do not allow assignment during certain periods of the contract at all.

On the EGP 5 million unit above, a 10% fee is EGP 500,000, eight times the platform's fee. A fee that size can wipe out the logic of a transfer, and push the owner back towards cancelling instead.

The law is less settled than developers' contracts suggest. Article 15 of Consumer Protection Law 181 of 2018 says:

A contract may not include any clause entitling the seller, or their successor, to take a percentage, fee or commission from the price of the buyer's disposal of the property unit, or in consideration of that disposal, and any clause to the contrary is void.

(Our translation.) Developers generally present their charge as an administrative fee for processing the transfer. Hossam Garamon, a lawyer quoted by Banker News, said that label does not settle the question and that a 15% fee needs careful legal review. Others in the same coverage called for fixed fees tied to actual costs and for standard contract models. We have not found a court ruling that settles it either way. This is not legal advice; if the fee decides whether a transfer makes sense, have a lawyer read your contract.

The state's own developer is moving in the other direction. In July 2026 the New Urban Communities Authority announced up to 70% off unit assignment fees in several new cities, including 10th of Ramadan, New Obour, New October and cities in Upper Egypt, alongside a 1% administrative fee on assignment requests and a 70% waiver on late-payment penalties for people who clear overdue instalments within three months. Those rules cover NUCA's own units, not private developers, and they come with eligibility conditions worth checking against the decision itself.

Expect this fee to be the main battleground in the months ahead. A platform built on "get back what you paid" makes a 15% fee visible in a way that a private resale never did.

What it changes in the market

Part of the instalment secondary market now has public numbers. Brokers have always known that some instalment buyers want out. What is new is a published, running count. It covers only the platform's own users, and it is self-published and unaudited, but it exists, and the first index is already being quoted on television.

Overprice resale gets harder. If a unit similar to yours is listed at its original contract price with no seller commission, a buyer has much less reason to pay you a premium of a million pounds on top of what you paid. Some of the price rise that resale sellers expected to capture is likely to go to buyers instead.

Developers get an uncomfortable signal about who can buy. On the platform, demand bunched below EGP 3 to 4 million, with a typical buyer holding about EGP 1 million in cash. That is one audience, but it is not a comfortable picture of how many buyers can afford what is being launched. High-end units with 1 or 2 requests each have a thin exit. Buyers considering a large off-plan commitment will notice that too.

It gives buyers another source of units. A contract signed in 2024 at a 2024 price is a different offer from a new launch at a 2026 price. A buyer still has to check actual construction progress, what is left to pay and the contractual handover date. That shift of attention towards resale is part of the backdrop to Cityscape Egypt's cancellation this year.

Watch how developers respond. Tighter assignment rules, higher fees, in-house resale desks, or the opposite: lower fees to keep units moving instead of cancelled. None of that has been announced. It is the next thing to look for.

What it means if you are a broker

The brokers most exposed here are the ones whose resale business depended on owners holding out for a premium. Those listings now compete with a free-to-seller platform at contract price, and an owner who can get their money back without an overprice has less reason to wait for one.

The brokers who gain are the ones who understand the buyer side. The index has just told you what demand looks like among its buyers this year: around EGP 1 million in cash, around EGP 50,000 a month, and a strong preference for units under EGP 3 to 4 million. If your buyers look anything like that and you are still qualifying buyers against launch prices of EGP 15 million, you are qualifying against a market that is mostly not there.

There is also a conversation most brokers are not having. Clients you sold to in the last two years are at exactly the contract age where the index finds most of its sellers. Most of them are probably still paying. Some of them are quietly doing the arithmetic in this article. The broker who calls first, knows the developer's assignment terms and can lay out cancel against assign against resale is the one who keeps that client, and gets the next deal from them.

Finally, commission. A platform charging the buyer 1.25% and the seller nothing resets what a transfer "should" cost. Brokers working this side of the market will have to justify their fee with something a listing cannot do: knowing the developer, the paperwork and the buyer.

Before you use it

If you are thinking of assigning a contract, or buying one, check these before any money moves:

Does the developer allow assignment at this stage of the contract, and what is the fee in writing? Who pays it?
Are there overdue instalments or late penalties on the unit? Get written confirmation of the amounts, who pays them, and whether they must be cleared before the developer approves.
Has the developer approved the new buyer before the seller is paid?
How is the money held at completion? The platform's site describes verification and a case manager but does not describe escrow. Ask.
What does your own cancellation clause say? Compare it to the 15% figure rather than assuming it.

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