The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Image credit: Forbes Middle East

You may have seen the giant blue billboards that are all over the capital promoting a property tech startup called Nawy, or you may have come across their app while scrolling through the Play Store on your phone. Nawy was founded on one main aim: to facilitate finding the perfect place of residence for all interested homebuyers. They were able to bring this concept and vision to life by creating a real estate end-to-end platform that enables users to browse thousands of properties that can be filtered to match their criteria and ideal perception of their future home. You might be familiar with the brand when it was first created back in 2016 under the name “Cooing”, but now after rebranding, the name has changed to Nawy.

Let us further introduce the lifesaving strategy that this company follows. In a little over five years, the company satisfied over 40,000 individuals with its customisable search engine that filters locations, prices, number of bedrooms, and property types, as well as with its experienced property consultants. The perks of using Nawy’s facility include well-informed decisions for buyers without having multiple parties in the process. However, this simplified real estate experience gets even better. Once you have settled on a property, the company’s trusted team of dependable and experienced brokers and consultants take over to successfully finish the rest of the transaction, which is a free service with no additional cost to save the client from any further hassle.

We were given the pleasure of getting a one-on-one interview with the company’s CEO, Mostafa El Beltagy. According to El Beltagy, the amount of wasted time and stress that customers have to endure when taking the traditional method of obtaining a property is all due to the lack of transparency. Nawy, on the other hand, is aiming to eliminate all the hassle by being a platform that offers a detailed insight on available deals in Egypt’s gated communities.

During the interview, El Beltagy also shared with us the challenges the company faced. “This business is not a traditional tech venture,” he said. “We actually spent a lot of time perfecting our business model and made a conscious decision not to try to grow the business drastically for a few years. Unlike many startups which target exponential growth in the first month, we have been growing linearly and profitably.”

El Beltagy shared with us top secret advice for entrepreneurs and other startup companies, saying that you should “consider your business model and decide whether or not it is aligned with the benefit you give to the customer. If it is, there will be no problem generating value for your customer in the long run, which in turn will generate value for the business. If a business is only growing due to its funding and ability to subsidise its growth through price or unsustainable operating costs, this is not a business built to last. And although the allure of fast growth is hard to resist, it will inevitably lead to an overvalued business that will not be worth its valuation.”

Find out more about Nawy here.