United For Housing & Development is a 113-year-old Egyptian real-estate company, founded in 1907 and headquartered in Alexandria. Across that history they’ve developed roughly 10 million square meters of land, restored heritage properties, and built notable projects like El-Montaza City and Fardous October. With age, scale, and that kind of project portfolio comes paper — a century of deeds, maps, plans, contracts, and correspondence, accumulated across physical archives.
The brief was concrete: digitize the archive at scale, and give the team a tool to actually use the digitized records.
What we did
- Digitized roughly seven million papers and maps — the operational records of a 113-year-old company. Each document was scanned, OCR-processed, classified, tagged with metadata, and indexed.
- Built the retrieval web application UHD’s teams now use to search the archive, locate specific records, and pull up the original scan or map. Designed around the way the teams actually look for things — by project, deed reference, location, date, person, or free-text — rather than how the file room used to be organized.
- Designed the storage layer for safety first. Encrypted at rest, versioned, replicated, and audit-logged. The original company concern wasn’t convenience — it was the historical reality that physical documents get stolen, lost, or burnt. The digital archive removes that risk entirely.
Why it mattered
When UHD describe what they value about the project, two things come up: safety — the documents are no longer a single fire away from gone — and retrieval speed — what used to require walking to the file room is now a search box. Those two outcomes are what made the engagement worth it for them, more than any particular technical detail.
Quantitative figures — exact volumes, retrieval times, audit findings — will be added here once UHD signs off on what’s public-facing. The headline today is qualitative but concrete: ~7M pages digitized, retrieval-in-seconds, and safety against physical loss.