08/08/2014
Are You Kenyan? Then Stop Dreaming of the Day You’ll Own a Home and Become Your Landlord’s Best Friend!
Home ownership can be said to be a universal goal, or as close as one can come to such a thing. Who among us does not want a place to call one’s own, a place in which to create a family and entertain our loved ones? This goal that so many of us hold dear can however potentially be financially ruinous. Was it not the rush to make the American dream of home ownership a reality that brought the world to its knees in 2008? Home ownership in Kenya is a much more treacherous path to walk down in Kenya than it is in America, where defaulting on loans is a nearly painless process. In Kenya we have our dreaded auctioneers, those villains who appear at all hours of day or night with lorries in their tow, brandishing papers that give them rights to ownership over all but your soul. But in case you think I’m just a scaremonger hired by your landlord, let me present with hard cold facts; facts that will probably have you invite you landlord over to dinner just to stay on his good side.
The market dynamics in the Kenyan market indicate that it will be a long time before prices stabilize and buck their upward trend. This is mostly due to massive demand that is met with a chronic undersupply of housing units built per annum. In 2011, the Ministry of Housing estimated that only 50,000 housing units were brought to market. Considering that as of 2012 the population growth rate in Kenya was 4.2%, this means that approximately 206,000 housing units need to be brought to market each year to meet demand. Given that only about 50,000 units were brought to market in 2011, there was a shortage of 156,000 units that year which were added to the backlog of 2,000,000 units that were pending at that point in time. It is therefore not surprising that property prices have increased 3.46 times since 2000, or that the average price for a property has gone from 7.1 million in December 2000 to 24.8 million in June 2014. Considering that most Kenyans do not make enough money monthly to be able to service a mortgage (as is evidenced by there being only 20,000 outstanding mortgages in Kenya), you definitely do not want to go down that road. After all, who knows the next time the CBK rate will shoot from 8.50% to something more ominous, leaving you and yours destitute.
Knowing all of the above information do you now see why that dinner with your landlord might not be such a bad idea…