New opportunities, int. participants and optimism for Cityscape 2022 with Alexander Edwards

Despite inflation and the Egyptian pound’s fluctuation in recent weeks, Exhibition Director of Cityscape Egypt, Alexander Edwards, sees good thing on the horizon, asserting that it has actually created opportunities for international investors to invest in Egypt’s residential, commercial, and industrial properties.

Emphasizing his point, Edwards told Business Today Egypt that he has not seen much impact on Cityscape’s exhibitions so far. Edwards sat down with us to discuss Cityscape’s future moves and what we can expect for this year’s exhibition.

Currently, the world is facing many economic changes and a volatile environment; do you believe that this will affect organizing future Cityscape editions? How do you plan to face these challenges, and what are your alternatives?

High inflation rates is not happening just in Egypt, it is happening all over the world at the moment, and so companies and governments are making decisions and stands against these economic changes as much as they possibly can.

However, inflation, in some ways, and the currency fluctuation is a great opportunity for international investors to invest in the country, whether it is residential, commercial, and industrial. There are many great challenges abroad, including what is going on between Ukraine and Russia, but on our side of things, we don’t see that much of an impact on our exhibitions.

What are your expectations on visitor attendance and participating companies for this year’s edition?

Our expectations as a company and as organizers are always extremely high. The increase in the amount of exhibitors always leads to an increase in the amount of visitors that comes to the event. We would like to see more exhibitors supporting our foundation of course, and see the exhibitors that have been with us for the past 10 years in Cityscape Egypt.

We will be including features at this year’s show to not just support developers, but also to attract visitors by giving them another reason to visit the exhibition, and that’s the investment in real estate. However, we do want to give them other reasons to come, and I believe that the market is well established and mature enough to possibly offer education seminars as well.

Could you share with us the volume of deals that were listed in last year’s Cityscape, and how many do you expect this year?

It is very difficult for us to generate the amount of revenues we previously got at Cityscape 2021.

Looking at examples such as Coldwell Banker, one of the more established brokerages regionally and globally, and looking at the numbers they produced at the exhibition, probably reaching billions of Egyptian pounds; this gives you a small picture of how much revenue was generated last year.

The question we ask our exhibitors is "what is new for this year?" The type of projects that will be on display, its price range and etc., which enables us to tailor to a more specific type of visitor, driving them into our exhibitions and understanding their expectations. We want to improve and be better each and every year, and so far we have managed that, and 2022 will be no different.

In regards to COVID-19, what are the safety measures and precautions that will be taken into consider at this year’s edition?

For the last two years, we have had something called Informa Allsecure, which is a set of guidelines that is established by us as a company. We are still working with local governments and venues to ensure that we have the right precautions in place at that particular time.

I don’t want to say what the precautions are right now, because they might change by September, but be sure that if precautions are needed, we will implement them, just as we have done for the past two years.

Are there any other countries that will be invited to participate in this year’s edition? How do you promote for Cityscape abroad?

We’ve always had international participation at Cityscape Egypt, and for this year’s edition, I would like to bring even more companies into the exhibition. At the moment, I am speaking with government institutions in Turkey, as well as have conversations with developers in Cyprus. So yes, there is an opportunity for us to bring more international companies to Cityscape Egypt, it’s a tough task but we will manage it.

Do you believe that it is possible to merge the conference held in the GCC and in Egypt, in order to exchange expertise and culture?

In all our Cityscapes, every country has had different challenges when it comes to the real estate industry and they need different answers, and different content. What we are looking at is to actually bring in international speakers into Cityscape Egypt this year, there are many different voices with different experiences, so yes, we are looking into introducing international speakers at the conference.

Will there be anything new presented at this year’s Cityscape Egypt exhibition?

That’s what everyone wants to know, and we have got some really exciting things planned for Cityscape Egypt 2022 in September.

While I am not going to share details, you can expect to see some new activations in the exhibition this year and in our marketing campaigns. There are going to be a lot of different things this year, but we will leave it as a surprise.