Developers target low-cost home buyers on Mombasa Road

IN SUMMARY

·         Rogam Investments, Karibu Homes and Peninsula Development offer Sh1 million houses.

·         The developers are pitching to buyers that the monthly mortgage payments for the units are equivalent to their current rent.

By JOHN GACHIRI, jgachiri@ke.nationmedia.com

Three real estate developers are building low-cost houses along Mombasa Road targeting first-time buyers with prices starting at Sh1 million per unit.

The developers — Rogam Investments, Karibu Homes and Peninsula Development Company — are pitching to buyers that the monthly mortgage payments for the units are equivalent to their current rent.

At an interest rate of 15 per cent per year, a Sh1 million house would require Sh12,000 a month for a 20-year mortgage while a Sh2.5 million house would require Sh31,000 a month at the same interest over a similar period.

Rogam Investments is undertaking the project as a mixed development of studios and apartments in Mlolongo, Machakos County. The project, dubbed First Homes, has a sale value of Sh500 million.

The firm said that it was aiming at attracting first-time home buyers such as working recent graduates.

Mr Aaron Gitonga, a director at Rogam Investments, said the firm chose to serve the low-end market because it is under-served unlike the high-end one which has signs of saturation.

“This is a market where there is a lot of demand but not many developers are looking at it,” Mr Gitonga told the Business Daily.

First Homes has studio apartments that go for between Sh1.5 million and Sh2.7 million, one-bedroom units at Sh2.5 million and two-bedroom ones at Sh3.6 million.

Rogam Investment began building homes in January last year and the first ones are expected to be ready for occupation by September.

The firm is financing the project through a mix of equity and loan from Co-operative Bank.

Availability of less costly, large tracts of land is the main reason attracting developers to Mlolongo and neighbouring Athi River towns. A large pool of employees from factories and offices along Mombasa Road and the Export Processing Zone is another reason.

Karibu Homes is putting up a Sh3 billion estate in Athi River. The apartments are priced at between Sh1.6 million and Sh5.25 million. The estate will have 1,082 units.

Peninsula Development Company plans to roll out apartment blocks worth Sh1.5 billion by the end of this year targeting first-time home buyers with units costing from Sh1 million. 
The firm has a mixed development in Mlolongo and another one on Ngong Road, also targeting first-time buyers.
Mr Gitonga said that land prices are the biggest barrier to putting up more low cost units. “The price of land should be less than 10 per cent of the total construction cost,” said Mr Gitonga. Currently the price is about 25 per cent of the overall cost of a project. 
Property consultants say that land prices are still on the rise in most satellite towns.

http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Developers-target-low-cost-home-buyers-on-Mombasa-Road/-/539552/2798810/-/lgwse0z/-/index.html

Foreign billionaire investors seek a slice of Kenya

By Sheila  Kimani

The thriving real estate sector is attracting foreign investors from across the world as they seek to capitalise on the country’s strategic location as a regional business hub. Mukesh Ambani When Delta Corp sold two prime properties in Nairobi, few people connected it to India’s richest businessman, Mukesh Ambani. The 53-year-old tycoon made Sh2.5 billion from the deal in Kenya in which he sold Delta Centre in Upper Hill to the World Bank and Delta Towers in Westlands to University of Nairobi Staff P
ension Scheme and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Ambani has been slowly upping his interest in East Africa, with his company, Reliance Industries, working alongside the Delta Corp East Africa Limited. In mid-2013, Business Daily reported that he had acquired ten prime plots in Nairobi valued at Sh2.9 billion that are to be used for commercial and residential development. In February 2014, the same paper reported that Mukesh Ambani had reported another gain of Sh189 million from part-sale of his Kenyan real estate holdings.  A month earlier, Delta Corp chief finance officer Hardik Dhebar was quoted as saying that real estate projects in Kenya had returned Sh2billion profit.

Aliko Dangote Coming to Kenya in the entourage of Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan in 2013,  Aliko Dangote felt certain that in three years, his company would be one of the dominant cement producers in Kenya. He revealed plans to build a $400 million cement plant. “We have realised that if we really want to do something big in East Africa, we must operate in Kenya. We believe that in the next two and half years, we will be the dominant player in cement in Kenya,” Forbes quoted him saying at the time. With the likes of Bamburi Cement and Athi River Mining already holding the largest market share, he knew it would not be easy for him to penetrate the Kenyan market. However, owing to his reputable Dangote Cement business, which is the largest cement manufacturer in Africa with stakes in nine African countries like Tanzania and Ethiopia, there was a chance that his entry into the Kenyan market would be a game-changer.Two years on, the cement plant is yet to be as it faces opposition from different quarters.

Adil Popat has worked in different sectors like motor vehicles and hospitality. His interests in the hospitality sector saw him work with top franchise Kempinski to bring business travel and luxury to Kenya, in the form of Villa Rosa Kempinksi. Years after working with top hospitality brands like the Hilton Hotel, witnessing how other top brands had succeeded in Kenya and even starting his own hotel franchise — Ocean Basket — Popat’s partnership saw a transformation in the Kenyan hospitality industry. Apart from Villa Rosa Kempinski, his firm’s focus has seen him expand under the Acacia brand to Acacia Premier Kisumu, a four-star hotel located in the leafy Milimani suburb and offers views of Lake Victoria, the 168-room Acacia Premier Nairobi, as well as many other investments that run into millions of shillings.

Richard Branson Owing to the Maasai Mara’s wildebeest migration that made it the Seventh Wonder of the World, Virgin Atlantic’s billionaire CEO Richard Branson chose to invest in Kenya’s tourism, specialising in luxury camps. With an already buzzing airline company, Sir Branson proudly announced that he would be opening a luxury game camp next to the Maasai Mara Game Park as it would be in line with the tourism and travel industry. Yet again, this would be a familiar venture given his South African reserve that has been in business for over 20 years. Following in the footsteps of his Ulusaba private game reserve located in the Sabi Sands in South Africa, the Kenyan luxury safari camp dubbed Mahali Mzuri boasts a 15-tent luxury camp whose rates are about $590 (Sh50,740) per person per night.

Read more at: http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/lifestyle/article/2000166060/foreign-billionaire-investors-seek-a-slice-of-kenya?pageNo=2

Kenya: What the Law Says About Property Ownership

Property in Kenya can take many forms. It can be movable or immovable. Article 260 of The Constitution provides that "property" includes any vested or contingent right to, or interest

in or arising from--

(a) land, or permanent fixtures on, or improvements to, land;

(b) goods or personal property;

(c) intellectual property; or

(d) money, choses in action or negotiable instruments;

As such property never floats around without an owner. The owner can be a person or a group. It's no wonder we have documents that are used as proof of ownership of property like log books, title deeds and so on.

When alive, land is usually registered in the names of real or juristic persons.

The Constitution extends a protection and a guarantee of right to own land under Article 40. (1) Subject to provides that every person has the right, either individually or in association with others, to acquire and own property--

(a) of any description; and

(b) in any part of Kenya.

Property can be owned by spouses jointly or separately. The fact that property is registered in the name of one spouse does not mean that it is owned exclusively by one spouse. The Matrimonial Property Act provides that a spouse shall at all times have an overriding interest in matrimonial property. The spouse in whose name the property is registered is deemed to hold the property in trust for the other spouse.

The right over property comes to an end upon the demise of the person in whose name it is registered. A dead person cannot own land.

The law of Succession Act regulates the process that the ownership of property is expected to flow through from the deceased to the living. The change of the ownership from the deceased to the living is done through wills in case the deceased had prepared one.

Such a person is said to have died testate. The person who makes a will is known as the testator. The distribution or the general handling of the property they leave behind is regulated by the wishes that testator had expressed in their will. The Testator has to appoint a person known as the executor who will be tasked with the responsibility of implementing the desires of the testator.

Majority of us Kenyans, do not prepare wills. In the event that one dies leaving no will behind, then the Law of Succession Act provides that such a person has died intestate. In the event the deceased had property, then the person who is recognised by the law of succession as eligible must apply for letters of administration. The property left behind by the deceased is known as the estate.

In Kenya, dealing with the property of the deceased without letters of administration is illegal/a court order. Many people dispose of, distribute, and transfer the property of the departed loved ones without letters of administration out of ignorance. This is known as intermeddling.

Letters of administration are court orders that appoint an administrator who stands in for the deceased for purposes of collating the assets, liabilities, debts owed by /owed to the deceased. He has the task of paying off debts and distributing the property left behind by the deceased to the beneficiaries.

It must be noted that the administrator so appointed by the court is not the new owner of the property of the deceased. The administrator has to report back to the court that he has completed the task of distributing the estate of the deceased.

The letters of administration granted by the court can be challenged by an aggrieved party who can even apply to the court for the revocation of the grant. This happens for example when the there is a conflict of interest between the administrators role and the beneficiaries or where the administrator is mismanaging the estate or is incapable of rendering an account of the activities of the estate.

The death of administrator does not bring closure to the process. A new one can be appointed by the court to complete the tasks that are pending. An administrator who is incapable of performing his duties can be substituted with another one.

Always remember that it is illegal to deal with the property of a deceased person unless you have a court order. Ignorance of the law is not and will never become an excuse.

By John Chigiti
http://allafrica.com/stories/201501071253.html 

Karen land saga a stark reminder of dark past

Once again Kenyans are being treated to scenes of accusations and counter-accusations regarding corruption that have predictably taken a political twist. On one side is the Coalition for Restoration for Democracy (CORD) and on another side are politicians and Members of Parliament from the Jubilee-led government.

But before Kenyans allow themselves to once again get lost in the politics that often overshadows claims of big corruption (Anglo Leasing, Standard Gauge Railway, Lamu) we need to pause and reflect on what the latest scandal says about our respect for the rule of law. Two questions come to mind. One is the sanctity of legal documents like the title deed. Are such documents safe from corrupt politicians and businessmen?

This is not the first time that court orders are being selectively followed since the new constitution was promulgated four years ago. It sets a dangerous precedent in the country. The Constitution not only spells out the country's bill of rights and laws of the land, it is also supposed to be the arbiter that ensures that the powerful do not ride roughshod over the weak.

The fact that a select group of individuals can take it upon themselves to violate the country's sacred laws because of their insatiable greed should worry all of us. This does not exclude government because it is in place by virtue of the same law. The new allegations of high level corruption and impunity in government should prod the executive, the legislature and the judiciary to smoke out the individuals who are hell-bent on subverting our governance system.

If such impunity is allowed, a dangerous precedent will be set and this is risky as it has the potential reverse the gains that the country has made in cleaning its institutions over the last 15 years. The Karen land circus unfortunately reminds us there is a time when impunity ruled our land. That there is a time powerful and connected people could grab property and get away with it. This should not be allowed to happen again.

Read more at: https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000138923/karen-land-saga-a-stark-reminder-of-dark-past

Survey unearths most corrupt land registries in Kenya

A new survey of land registries has ranked Isiolo, Naivasha and Thika as the most corrupt while Bomet, Eldoret and Kitale were ranked as the least. The survey released yesterday by the Land Development and Governance Institute (LDGI) ranked the registry at the Ministry of Lands headquarters in Ardhi House in 12th position out of the 40 registries surveyed. More than half (52 per cent) of Kenyans surveyed said that corruption is still high at land registries while 48 per cent said it was low.

In terms of timeliness in handling land transactions, registries in Wote, Eldoret and Kwale were ranked the best while Migori, Kakamega and Thika emerged the worst. Ardhi House emerged seventh and was ranked in the 'fair' category. Regarding ease of accessing information, Wote, Kerugoya and Bomet emerged the top while Bungoma, Kakamega and Kilifi were ranked the worst. Ardhi House was ranked 'fair' and came a distant number 15. The rankings are based on surveys of 1,024 Kenyans who frequently seek services at land registries across the country. It was conducted between August 25 and September 12. The survey had sought to gauge the state of service delivery in land registries and determine the status and impact of implementation of land reforms. It also revealed that majority of Kenyans (71 per cent) feel the recent re-organisation of land registries has not improved services significantly. Those seeking services in registries in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kwale reported little improvement while majority of those in Kwale reported no improvement.

ELIMINATE BROKERS

The re-organisation is being spearheaded by Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu and Principal Secretary Mariam El-Maawy. At registries in Nairobi, 33 per cent said they have not felt any improvement while 25 per cent said the it was slight. In Mombasa, 47 per cent said they have not felt any improvement and in Kilifi, 80 per cent reported no improvement. However, those in Kwale Registry reported high improvement in services (55 per cent). LDGI Chairman Ibrahim Mwathane said Kenyans interviewed are demanding urgent computerisation of land records and elimination of brokers from all registries to ease transactions. "Timeliness of transactions has improved from last year but are still not satisfactory due to lack of computerised records and intentional delays by ministry officials," he said. He called for a transparent process of the computerisation of records from tendering to execution.

Source; http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000138262/survey-unearths-most-corrupt-land-registries-in-kenya 

In World's Best-Run Economy, House Prices Keep Falling -- Because That's What House Prices Are Supposed To Do

When Americans travel abroad, the culture shocks tend to be unpleasant. Robert Locke’s experience was different. In buying a charming if rundown house in the picturesque German town of Goerlitz, he was surprised – very pleasantly – to find city officials second-guessing the deal. The price he had agreed was too high, they said, and in short order they forced the seller to reduce it by nearly one-third. The officials had the seller’s number because he had previously promised  to renovate the property and had failed to follow through.

As Locke, a retired historian, points out, the Goerlitz authorities’ attitude is a striking illustration of how differently the German economy works. Rather than keep their noses out of the economy, German officials glory in influencing market outcomes. While the Goerlitz authorities are probably exceptional in the degree to which they micromanage house prices, a fundamental principle of German economics is to keep housing costs stable and affordable.

It is hard to quarrel with the results. On figures cited in 2012 by the British housing consultant Colin Wiles, one-bedroom apartments in Berlin were then selling for as little as $55,000, and four-bedroom detached houses in the Rhineland for just $80,000. Broadly equivalent properties in New York City and Silicon Valley were selling for as much as ten times higher.

Goerlitz: picturesque — and tightly controlled. (Photo credit: chrisbulle)

Although conventional wisdom in the English-speaking world holds that bureaucratic intervention in prices makes for subpar outcomes, the fact is that the German economy is by any standards one of the world’s most successful. Just how successful is apparent in, for instance, international trade. At $238 billion in 2012, Germany’s current account surplus was the world’s largest. On a per-capita basis it was nearly 15 times China’s and was achieved while German workers were paid some of the world’s highest wages. Meanwhile German GDP growth has been among the highest of major economies in the last ten years and unemployment has been among the lowest.

On Wiles’s figures, German house prices in 2012 represented a 10 percentdecrease in real terms compared to thirty years ago. That is a particularly astounding performance compared to the UK, where real prices rose by more than 230 percent in the same period. 

A key to the story is that German municipal authorities consistently increase housing supply by releasing land for development on a regular basis. The ultimate driver is a  central government policy of providing financial support to municipalities based on an up-to-date and accurate count of the number of residents in each area.

The German system moreover is deliberately structured to encourage renting rather than owning. Tenants enjoy strong rights and, provided they pay their rent, are virtually immune from eviction and even from significant rent increases.

Meanwhile demand for owner occupation is curbed by German regulation. German banks, for instance, are rarely permitted to lend more than 80 percent of the value of a property, thus a would-be home buyer first needs to accumulate a deposit of at least 20 percent. To cap it all, ownership of a home is subject to a serious consumption tax, while landlords are encouraged by favorable tax treatment to maximize the availability of rental properties.

How does all this contribute to Germany’s economic growth? Locke, a prominent critic of America’s latter-day enthusiasm for doctrinaire free-market solutions and a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii, notes that a key outcome is that Germany’s managed housing market helps smooth the availability of labor. And by virtually eliminating  bubbles, the German system minimizes the sort of misallocation of resources that is more or less unavoidable in the Anglo-American boom-bust cycle. That cycle is exacerbated by tax incentives which encourage citizens to view home ownership as an investment, resulting in much hoarding and underutilization of space.

In the  German system moreover,  house-builders  rarely accumulate the huge large land banks that are such a dangerous distraction for U.S. house-builders like Pulte Homes, D. R. Horton, Lennar, and Toll Brothers. German house-builders just focus on building good-quality homes cheaply, secure in the knowledge that additional land will become available at reasonable cost when needed.

Locke is the co-author, with J.C. Spender, of Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance, a book I highly recommend.

Source; http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-worlds-best-run-economy-home-prices-just-keep-falling-because-thats-what-home-prices-are-supposed-to-do/ 

MOST GERMANS DON’T BUY THEIR HOMES, THEY RENT. HERE’S WHY

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Moving on up, in Berlin. Getty Images/Sean Gallup

 
 
 

WRITTEN BY

Matt Phillips@MatthewPhillips

January 23, 2014

It’s just a fact. Many Germans can’t be bothered to buy a house.

The country’s homeownership rate ranks among the lowest in the developed world, and nearly dead last in Europe, though the Swiss renteven more. Here are comparative data from 2004, the last time the OECD updated its numbers. (Fresh comparisons are tough to find, as some countries only publish homeownership rates every few years or so.)

​

And though those data are old, we know Germany’s homeownership rate remains quite low. It was 43% in 2013.

This may seem strange. Isn’t home ownership a crucial cog to any healthy economy? Well, as Germany shows—and Gershwin wrote—it ain’t necessarily so.

In Spain, around 80% of people live in owner-occupied housing. (Yay!) But unemployment is nearly 27%, thanks to the burst of a giant housing bubble. (Ooof.)

Only 43% own their home in Germany, where unemployment is 5.2%.

Of course, none of this actually explains why Germans tend to rent so much. Turns out, Germany’s rental-heavy real-estate market goes all the way back to a bit of extremely unpleasant business in the late 1930s and 1940s.

The war

Rollerskating in Essen, February 1949.AP Photo

By the time of Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, 20% of Germany’s housing stock was rubble. Some 2.25 million homes were gone. Another 2 million were damaged. A 1946 census showed an additional 5.5 million housing units were needed in what would ultimately become West Germany.

Germany’s housing wasn’t the only thing in tatters. The economy was a heap. Financing was nil and the currency was virtually worthless. (People bartered.) If Germans were going to have places to live, some sort of government program was the only way to build them.

And don’t forget, the political situation in post-war Germany was still quite tense. Leaders worried about a re-radicalization of the populace, perhaps even a comeback for fascism. Communism loomed as an even larger threat, with so much unemployment.

West Germany’s first housing minister—a former Wehrmacht man by the name of Eberhard Wildermuth—once noted that “the number of communist voters in European countries stands in inverse proportion to the number of housing units per thousand inhabitants.”

A housing program would simultaneously put people back to work and reduce the stress of the housing crunch. Because of such political worries—as well as genuine, widespread need—West Germany designed its housing policy to benefit as broad a chunk of the population as possible.

The rise of renting

A quonset hut village in Berlin, January 1946.Getty Images/Keystone

Soon after West Germany was established in 1949, the government pushed through its first housing law. The law was designed to boost construction of houses which, “in terms of their fittings, size and rent are intended and suitable for the broad population.”

It worked. Home-building boomed, thanks to a combination of direct subsidies and generous tax exemptions available to public, non-profit and private entities. West Germany chopped its housing shortage in half by 1956. By 1962, the shortage was about 658,000. The vast majority of new housing units were rentals. Why? Because there was little demand from potential buyers. The German mortgage market was incredibly weak and banks required borrowers to plunk down large down payments. Few Germans had enough money.

​

Why Germany?

It’s worth noting that Germany wasn’t the only country with a housing crisis after World War II. Britain had similar issues. And its government also undertook large-scale spending to promote housing. Yet the British didn’t remain renters. The UK homeownership rate is around 66%, much higher than Germany’s.

​

Why? The answer seems to be that Germans kept renting because, in Germany, rental housing is kind of nice.

1

Economists think German housing policy struck a much better balancebetween government involvement and private investment than in many other countries. For instance, in the UK, when the government gave housing subsidies to encourage the building of homes after the war, only public-sector entities, local governments, and non-profit developers were eligible for them. That effectively squeezed the private sector out of the rental market. In Germany, “the role of public policy was to follow a third way that involved striking a sensitive balance between ‘letting the market rip’ in an uncontrolled manner and strangling it off by heavy-handed intervention,” wrote economist Jim Kemeny, of the German approach to housing policy.

Britain also imposed stringent rent and construction cost caps on developers of public housing. Under those constraints, housing quality suffered. Over time, the difference between publicly and privately financed construction became so glaring that rental housing—which was largely publicly financed—acquired a stigma. In other words, it became housing for poor people.

Germany also loosened regulation of rental caps sooner than many other countries, according to economist Michael Voightländer, who has written extensively about Germany’s housing market. By contrast in the UK, harsher regulation on rented housing stretched well into the 1980s, pushing landlords to cut back on maintenance and driving the quality of housing down still further.

Cheap rents

​

Of course, all that policy-design detail is interesting. But there might be a simpler explanation for the popularity of renting in Germany. For one thing, it’s relatively cheap. (Germany is listed as “Deu” above.)

Renter-friendly regulations

​

Why is renting cheap in Germany? Well, even though the country’s policies might have been slightly more balanced than in other countries, its rental market is still robustly regulated, and the regulations are quite favorable to renters. (Given the strong political constituency renters represent in Germany, this shouldn’t be too surprising.) For example, German law allows state governments to cap rent increases at no more than 15% over a three-year period.

1

Tax treatment

New supply will be coming online in Berlin.Getty Images/Sean Gallup

There’s another pretty simple reason Germans are less likely to own houses. The government doesn’t encourage it. Unlike high-homeownership countries like Spain, Ireland and the US, Germany doesn’t let homeowners deduct mortgage-interest payments from their taxes. (There’s more on the structure of European tax systems here.) Without that deduction, the benefits of owning and renting are more evenly balanced. “Both homeowners and landlords in Germany are barely subsidized,” wrote Voightländer in a paper on low homeownership rates in Germany.

Those regulations, a solid supply of rental housing, and the fact that German property prices historically rise very slowly —that’s a whole other story—mean German rents don’t rise very fast. And because one of the main reasons to buy a home is to hedge against rising rents, the tendency of German rents to rise slowly results in fewer homebuyers and a lower homeownership rate.

A number of other elements contribute too, but it’s tough to disentangle what is cause and what is effect. For example, German banks are quite risk-averse, making mortgages harder and more expensive to get. Others argue that the supply of rental housing might be higher in Germany because of its decentralized, regional approach to planning. (The UK is much more centralized.)

Is Germany just better at housing?

Not necessarily. It’s not as if Germans spend a lot less of their pay on housing. The data below show Germans actually pay more for housing—as a percentage of disposable income—than housing-crazed countries like the US, Spain and Ireland.

1

​

But given the economic spasms suffered in house-crazy economies such as the United States, Spain and Ireland in recent years, the German approach to housing looks pretty good right now—even if, before the crash, the low homeownership rate was seen as an albatross around Germany’s economic neck.

And German people clearly like how their system of housing works.According to the OECD, more than 93% of German respondents tell pollsters they’re satisfied with their current housing situation. That’s one of the highest rates of any nation the rich-country think tank surveyed. Then again, the Irish and the Spanish—where homeownership is much more widely spread—seem just as happy.

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