Frequently asked
Straight answers, no sales fog
The questions serious clients ask before they engage us — answered the way we would answer them across a desk.
Working with us
Thirty to forty-five minutes: your goals, timeline, budget and risk appetite; an honest read on whether current market conditions favour your mission; and — if we are not the right firm for it — we say so and point you somewhere useful. No pitch decks, no pressure, no fee.
Mandate-dependent and stated in writing before work begins: a success fee on sales and acquisitions, a management percentage on portfolios (market-typical ranges sit around 5–8% of collected income), and fixed or retainer structures for advisory and JV structuring. No formal fee schedule is published on this site yet — the fee disclosure on our Proof page states what is charged, what is negotiated per mandate, and what we deliberately do not charge for. We are allergic to unclear fee stacks and will walk you through every line before you sign anything.
Constantly — it is one of our core desks. The protocol: verification before money, escrowed deposits, staged payments against milestones, documented escorted inspections, and reporting you can read from any timezone. Two of the representative mandates on our track-record page (Nyali, Kitengela) ran end-to-end with clients who never boarded a flight — the playbook is exactly as described; the named cases are labelled representative until permissioned client stories replace them.
A one-page sense of three things: what you want the money to do (income, occupation, or land banking), what you can spend including the ~5.9% urban transaction cost stack, and when you would want to transact. If you already have a target, bring whatever documents you have been shown — we will tell you within minutes whether they deserve a verification run. A bank balance is not a plan; bring the plan and we will supply the market.
We are investment advisers first: if an asset builds wealth under discipline, it is in scope. That means commercial property, income-producing residential (apartment blocks, rental portfolios, holiday-home income plays), and raw land along growth corridors. What we do not run is a conveyancing factory for owner-occupied homes with no investment dimension — those clients deserve a licensed residential specialist, and we happily refer them.
Buying & selling
Budget roughly 5.9% in urban areas: stamp duty at 4% (2% rural), legal fees around 1.5%, valuation ~0.25% and registration/misc ~0.15%. Mortgage buyers should add bank processing (~0.5%) and required insurances. We publish the full stack in writing before you commit — surprises are for birthdays.
A clean, verified file runs six to ten weeks from offer to registered title: verification days, sale agreement one to two weeks, stamp duty and Ardhisasa transfer two to six weeks. Mortgages add two to four weeks of bank processing. The biggest source of delay is seller documentation — which is why we verify before anyone signs anything.
The house method, now also automated in Keja.ai: official Ardhisasa title and encumbrance search, rates and rent clearance, approved-plan reconciliation, price-band analysis against comparable sales, and photo/duplicate forensics on listings. If something does not reconcile, the deal pauses — not the other way around.
Yes — with one large exception. Non-citizens can own commercial and residential property and land, but the Constitution bars non-citizens from freehold agricultural land. In practice most foreign-held interests are 99-year leaseholds, renewable, which finance and trade like any other title. Structuring (joint ventures, spousal holdings, company vehicles) is genuinely advocate territory — we flag the shape of it and let licensed counsel make it legal.
Typically 10–20% of price for resident earners with provable income, and often 20–30% for non-resident borrowers — bank and product dependent, so treat those as bands, not quotes. Rates track the CBK benchmark with a lag, and fixed-rate windows are widening again as competition returns. Budget the deposit and the ~5.9% cost stack separately: the bank funds the price, never the duties.
We do not time markets for clients; we price discipline. What we can say honestly: rates are off their peaks, sellers who held 2022 prices through the freeze are transacting again, and repricing after rate cuts arrives with a lag measured in quarters — which is the argument for acting inside the window rather than after the headlines. If your horizon is under two years, no market is a good market. If it is five-plus, entry windows like this one are rarer than they feel.
Any of these ends the conversation until it is fixed: an allotment letter marketed as a title; a seller whose name does not match the registered owner; succession documents missing on inherited land; county rate arrears; unapproved change of user; beacons that do not match the registry map; and any pressure to pay before a search. The full register, with what each defect looks like, is in our search-to-close playbook on the Insights page.
Selling & valuations
Three methods, and the asset class decides which one leads. Income property is valued off verified rent rolls and escalation (capitalised income); land and homes lead with comparable verified transactions in the same micro-market; special-purpose assets lean on replacement cost. Every method produces a range, not a number — anyone quoting your asset to the shilling is flattering you. A desk opinion costs a conversation; a formal valuation for banks or courts must come from a registered valuer, and we coordinate it.
Priced-right land in a liquid corridor can move in weeks; income property sells at the speed its file verifies — a clean tenancy schedule and rates clearance can close a buyer in 90 days, a messy one invites 180 days of renegotiation. The asset that sits on the market for a year is almost always mispriced at listing. Our listings carry a written pricing rationale so the price is a position, not a hope.
Do the hygiene, skip the theatre. Clearance certificates, repairs of the visible-and-structural kind, and a documented compliance file raise your price because they remove buyer risk. Speculative upgrades — imported kitchens, lifestyle landscaping — rarely return their cost in this market: buyers price their own taste at a discount. Spend on the file, not the finishes; we will tell you which side of that line each item falls on.
Land & title
Freehold is absolute ownership; leasehold is a very long tenancy you can mortgage, bequeath and sell — conventionally 99 years for new grants, renewable, with ground rent due to the National Land Commission. Most of Nairobi’s prime commercial land is leasehold and nobody treats it as second-class: banks lend on it and it trades at full value. What matters is that whichever form you hold is clean — a defective freehold is worth less than a pristine lease.
Ardhisasa is the National Land Information System: the digital registry that progressively onboards Kenya’s parcel records, making searches, transfers and lodgments electronic instead of queue-based. If your target parcel is on it, transactions run days faster. If it is not, the parcel is still valid — it simply processes through the manual registry with older timelines. We handle both rails weekly and tell you which one your file is on before you commit.
Two different bills, often confused. Land rates are levied by the county government on your parcel (they fund services, and they are why the county can block your transfer when unpaid). Land rent is the annual ground rent due to the National Land Commission on leasehold land only — freeholders never pay it. Both must be cleared before any transfer, and unpaid arrears accrue penalties that surface at exactly the wrong moment: completion.
The official search is the registry’s current extract for a title: the owner of record, the parcel’s size, and every registered encumbrance — charges, cautions, inhibitions, easements. On Ardhisasa parcels it returns in minutes; manual registries take days. Note what a search is not: it is not a rates-clearance certificate and not a rent statement — those are separate documents, and a complete verification file carries all three.
Diaspora & payments
Yes — it is a core desk, not an edge case. The machinery: a limited power of attorney (one parcel, one transaction, hard expiry, revocable) executed before your advocate, escrowed money released against milestones, and documented live inspections with your advocate reading out beacon coordinates against the registry map. The full protocol, including the fraud patterns it defeats, is in the Diaspora Playbook on our Insights page.
Into your advocate’s client account — never direct to the seller, never to a personal account described as “the office account”, and never in response to urgency. Stage the funds against milestones (agreement, clearances, lodging, registration) and keep the complete remittance trail: those receipts are your tax and compliance record for the eventual sale. If anyone in the transaction bristles at escrow, that reaction is the due diligence.
Directionally, and only directionally: non-resident rental income is taxed on different terms from resident income — commonly via a withholding tax on gross rent that is a final tax — with rates and treatment that change with finance acts. We are property people, not tax people: treat this answer as the reason to appoint a Kenyan tax adviser before your first tenant, not as the advice itself. We are happy to make the introduction.
Keja.ai & tokenization
Keja.ai is our digital flagship — Kenya’s AI real-estate advisor and cross-agency trust layer, launched in 2026. It carries the same verification discipline the firm runs manually into software: trust-scored listings, investment math with FACT/ESTIMATE/ASSUMPTION labels, and the Keja Tokenize demo for fractional ownership. You can browse it live at the Keja.ai preview (gadda00.github.io/keja-ai) until the keja.ai domain is pointed there.
Keja Tokenize currently runs in clearly-labelled demo/simulation mode: real Nairobi assets modelled with simulated ledgers, KYC gating and a secondary-market preview. Real, regulated tokenized offerings will follow the CMA sandbox process and institutional structuring work on our 2026–2030 roadmap. We will not sell securities ahead of the law.
The current platforms run client-side with your data stored locally in your own browser — we hold no central database of visitor accounts. Where real transactions begin, KYC and payment data will flow only through licensed, encrypted processors under written data-protection terms aligned to the Kenya Data Protection Act, 2019.
It is a transparent composite, not a black box: verification-stack results per listing (title search availability, encumbrance signals), listing forensics (duplicate photos, listing history, agent verification), price-band sanity against comparable verified transactions, and the track record of whoever posted it. Every number that feeds a score is labelled FACT, ESTIMATE or ASSUMPTION, so you can see exactly how much of a score is evidence and how much is inference — the opposite of a magic number.
When the law allows and the structuring is institutional-grade — in that order. The live roadmap runs the CMA regulatory sandbox and partnership structuring through 2026–2030; the demo exists so the mechanics are understood and stress-tested by real users before real money is involved. The honest answer is that we would rather be late and licensed than early and exposed. Join the waitlist inside Keja.ai to be told the moment that changes.
Trust & safety
Regularly, and on principle. We decline mandates where title cannot be verified, where the price cannot be justified by the income, or where the client’s interests would be better served by waiting. The house rule is simple: we say no to deals we would not do with our own money.
We operate within Kenya’s real-estate regulatory framework and work with licensed advocates for all conveyancing, with valuers registered where valuation is required, and towards EAC licensing as directives roll out. Regulatory posture — including the CMA sandbox track for tokenization — is documented on our Ventures page.
Then the structure you chose at the start earns its keep. An escrowed deposit released against milestone conditions is recoverable when those conditions fail — that is the entire point of escrow, and why we refuse unescrowed deals. If the file turns adversarial, your advocate has the standard remedies (specific performance, refund with interest, lien over the deposit), and the verification file you built before paying is now evidence. The worst-case scenarios in this market almost all share one feature: the buyer paid first and verified later.