May 4 - As the Next Move was launched last week, Al Futtaim Group unveiled two new phases of the Cairo Festival City -- Festival Living and the Business District. Spanning over three million square meters in New Cairo, the Festival City will be a mixture of residential and commercial districts.
Festival Living will occupy 130,000 square meters of land with several apartment buildings, four to seven floors and 500 apartments. Only 180 of these apartments will be built in the first phase. Then there is the Business District that will consist of three large administrative buildings. The project's completion date is set to be in 2012.
According to Amad Touni, Development Director of the Residential/Commercial Division at Al Futtaim Egypt, the global financial crisis has not affected them. “[After the crisis] we started moving to a better situation in the first quarter of 2010. A positive development from the crisis is that most developers are moving into projects other than the luxurious products," he said. "Some of the developers are going into low-cost housing and this is supported by our government. Some of the developers are going into luxury products. But most of them are going into an intermediate project that can sell to a [larger bracket] of the Egyptian population," added Touni.