This paper interrogates the political economy of re-regulation in market-driven economies through the lens of transformations in contemporary Cairo. Focusing on property markets, the paper demonstrates that rather than reveling in the freeing of real estate through the reversal of rent control laws, private sector actors were working to re-regulate the real estate market. They were not turning to legal mechanisms or patronage networks, but invested in the production of local community in central Cairo as they worked to re-regulate the market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2011-2012, the paper compares how two private sector actors with varying relationships to the market reacted to the reversal of rent control. The paper demonstrat...