Renting safely in Egypt: what a legitimate listing looks like

Most short-let renting in Egypt still happens person-to-person: a photo set forwarded on WhatsApp, a price agreed by voice note, a transfer sent to a personal account for a unit nobody has seen. Plenty of those arrangements are completely fine. The ones that are not tend to fail in the same few ways, and they are recognisable well before the money moves.

What a legitimate listing shows you

• Enough photographs of the actual unit to form a picture of it — including the rooms nobody flatters, like the second bathroom and the kitchen. A listing carrying three wide shots of a living room is hiding the rest.
• A specific location. Not "North Coast" but the compound, and ideally the position within it. Vagueness about where a unit is is the most reliable early warning there is.
• A price you can decompose: what the accommodation costs, what any fees are, and what the total is — before you pay, not after.
• A written cancellation position. Any at all. "We'll sort it out" is not one.
• An identifiable counterparty: a named host or a company with a trading history you can look at, reachable through something more durable than one phone number.

The red flags that actually matter

• Pressure to transfer a deposit to a personal wallet or bank account immediately, before any documentation exists, because "someone else is asking about the same dates".
• Photographs that appear elsewhere. Reverse-image search is thirty seconds of work and catches the laziest fraud outright.
• Refusal to put the dates, the total and the terms in writing — even informally. Someone who will not confirm what you are buying in text is telling you something.
• A price well below everything comparable in the same compound. Coastal pricing is not mysterious; a large discount usually means the unit, the dates, or the person is not what it appears.
• A demand for the full season up front, in cash or by wallet transfer, from someone you have no relationship with.

Deposits: what is normal, and what we do

A security deposit — a refundable sum held against damage — is a normal request in the wider Egyptian rental market, particularly on direct season-block lets. If you are asked for one privately, the questions that matter are how much, what it covers, who holds it, and the specific conditions under which it comes back. Get those in writing. An unconditional deposit with no stated return condition is not a deposit.

How paying through this site works

Payment runs through Kashier, an Egyptian payment gateway, on its hosted checkout — bank cards and mobile wallets. Your card details are entered on the gateway, not collected by us over the phone or by message. Nobody at HOMESOUT will ever ask you to send a payment to a personal account, and no legitimate booking on this site is ever completed that way.

On top of the accommodation cost, HOMESOUT charges guests a 12% service fee. It is shown in the breakdown before payment.

What you get back if you cancel

Every listing carries one of three cancellation policies, shown on the listing itself. These are the actual bands the system applies, not a summary:

• Flexible — cancel more than 24 hours before check-in and the accommodation cost is refunded in full. Inside 24 hours, nothing.
• Moderate — more than 5 days before check-in, the accommodation cost is refunded in full. Between 5 days and 24 hours, half of it. Inside 24 hours, nothing.
• Strict — more than 7 days before check-in, half the accommodation cost. Inside 7 days, nothing.

Two things to be clear about, because they are where expectations usually break. First, the service fee and any cleaning fee are not refunded on a guest cancellation, in any band — including the ones described as a "full refund", which means the full accommodation cost rather than the full amount you paid. Second, this applies to cancellations you make. If a host cancels on you, that is a different path and the payment is refunded in full.

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