Red Sea Housing Co-ops Get a Final Deadline: Licences by 1 January 2027, Homes Finished by October 2028
The Red Sea Governorate has handed housing co-operatives a fixed timetable and what it calls a last chance — licensing file by 1 January 2027, contracts awarded by 1 April 2027, construction complete by 1 October 2028 — and says it will go to law over the land where the dates are missed.
1 October 2026
Housing co-operatives that were allocated large areas of vacant land by the Red Sea Governorate have been given a fixed timetable and what the governorate describes as a last chance to get their projects built, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm.
The deadlines are set out in an official notice from the governorate's Handicrafts and Co-operation Department to the chairman of the Federal Co-operative Society for Building and Housing:
- 1 January 2027 — the complete licensing file must be submitted, described as the first step towards starting work.
- 1 April 2027 — tendering and award of contracts must be finished, so that building can actually begin.
- 1 October 2028 — the project must be complete, including its internal utilities.
The letter was signed by Eng. Hassan Mawafi, the governorate's secretary-general, and follows a meeting the Red Sea governor held with the building and housing co-operatives, attended by a representative of the societies registered in the governorate. That meeting examined how much each society had actually built and whether it had kept to the timeframes written into its contract.
Where the dates are missed, the governorate says it will take legal action under the terms of those contracts, citing the protection of public funds. It has drawn up a list of every registered co-operative that has been allocated land, and a separate list of societies left without a functioning board — bodies it says it has written to more than once. The Housing Co-operative Union and the General Authority for Building and Housing Co-operatives have been asked to supply the composition of those boards so a legal representative can be identified for each.
Al-Masry Al-Youm's report does not say how many societies are affected, how much land is involved, or how many homes the stalled projects were meant to deliver.
For anyone who has paid into a co-operative flat on this coast, the dates are the part worth keeping. They are the first published schedule these projects can be measured against, and they sit alongside the governorate's wider move on the land file — the pricing of Hurghada and Ras Ghareb plots held without contracts, and the new committee reviewing deals done by power of attorney.