The Sudanese army's recapture of more territories from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), including most recently the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, has been good news for tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees in Egypt, who started to pack up and return to their country.
At the same time, the return of the Sudanese threatens economic prospects of property owners in Egypt, whose profits swelled since the beginning of the Sudanese civil war in April 2023.
"The return of the Sudanese refugees to their country has deeply affected the local property market, paralysing it altogether," Adel al-Aswani, a real estate broker from Giza province, told The New Arab.
"The demand is falling dramatically while real estate clients are making themselves scarce in a mysterious way," he added.
Around 1.5 million Sudanese nationals ended up in Egypt since the war broke out in Sudan two years ago, according to the Egyptian government.
When they arrived, these Sudanese refugees raised demand for housing, creating a land boom that saw rent and housing prices rise dramatically, by 500 percent in some cases.
However, the same boom appears to be ending as the Sudanese start to return home, following the Sudanese army's success in scarring RSF troops out of one city after another.
So far, around 156,000 Sudanese nationals returned home, including 50,000 in the last three weeks only, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
Buses carrying Sudanese refugees desperate to return to their homes in liberated areas keep leaving from all parts of Egypt every day.
Burst bubble fears
By coming to Egypt, the Sudanese refugees joined millions of other foreigners who sought refuge in this populous, economically-struggling country.
Egypt presently hosts close to 9 million refugees from war-torn Arab and African states, the IOM says.
Refugees live inside Egyptian cities, not in camps or refugee centres, mixing with Egyptians and enriching Egyptian cultural life, especially culinary traditions.
The local property sector has been at the centre of effects from the war in Sudan, having absorbed the surge in demand for housing with the Sudanese refugees arriving here.
There are fears that the boom created by the increase in demand caused a bubble that will pop, which opens the door for a recession.
Mustafa Kamal, a civil servant in his late forties, owns a flat in Faisal, a sprawling lower middle class and poor neighbourhood in Giza province, where tens of thousands of Sudanese and other African refugees live, thanks to affordable rents and housing prices in it.
At the beginning of the housing demand surge, Kamal raised the rent of his flat by almost 400 percent, from 2,000 pounds ($39) to 8,000 Egyptian pounds ($156), having found Sudanese customers ready to pay this amount of money each month.
The Sudanese tenants of his flat left the flat two months ago and returned to their country. Since then, Kamal has been putting his flat up for sale, but has not received any suitable purchase offers yet.
"My flat was valued at 1.5 million (roughly $29,000) seven months ago," Kamal told TNA.
"I have already reduced its price by 200,000 pounds (around $3,900) to be able to sell it, but this doesn't seem to be enough to induce customers," he added.
Some people believe, meanwhile, that the downward trend of interest rates are occurring because of the purported decline in inflation, which could offer a ray of hope for property owners like Kamal.
Good news for poor tenants?
As the Sudanese gradually return to their country, rents are also lowering back to previous levels, making housing accessible to local renters who teetered on the brink of homelessness because of the Sudanese civil war.
Essam Raslan, a self-employed car mechanic with three children, was forced out of his flat in the southern Cairo district of Helwan last year.
Raslan, in his mid-thirties, used to pay 1,500 pounds ($29) in rent for his flat. Suddenly, however, the landlord told him that he had decided to raise the rent to 6,000 pounds ($117), an astronomical amount of money for a family man like him with a weekly pay of 1,000 pounds ($19).
This coincided with a surge in demand for housing by incoming Sudanese refugees in his district, he says.
Now, with more Sudanese refugees leaving every day, Raslan expects to find affordable housing for him and his family.
"The departure of the refugees means that there will be weaker demand for housing," Raslan told TNA.
"This will hopefully put an end to the unjustified rise in rent prices," he added.