LORDS of Exploitation

Property Management Firms In Kenya

This is the name given to lazy firms making money for doing nothing but collecting their payment fee, especially those managing middle income estates. Apparently the mandate of these organizations is to manage residential premises in the sense of ensuring the supply of basic amenities, carry out routine repairs and ensuring the safety and comfort of tenants in addition to collecting rents on behalf of the landlord. On the contrary, these organizations fast mushrooming in Nairobi and other cities in Kenya either are ignorant of the roles of property management firms or are just deliberately negligent of duty and parochial in their operation.

The first striking characteristic of these organizations is their poorly educated staff. You wonder whether poor grade is one of the criterion for recruitment - Massively uneducated and at times with little fluency in both English and Kiswahili. But that is tolerable until you are at their service then you get flabbergasted by the less than kind less than candid support given. Often times you are the one prodding for information that they should yield freely. This is you seeking their guidance when you have gotten a house and all their help is a turnoff.

You get an excellent house but then there are minor repairs that needed quick fix. Probably paint work and a bit of replacement in the metal fixtures here and there but what do they tell you? Pay for the unrepaired house first to express commitment then they will repair the house. You question the logic and then you remember your service lady or man has less than minimum education and does not understand logic or law. Need then presses you to comply to a fault, but then your expression of commitment yields no results either and these people will take you round and round till you end up making the repairs on your own.

At some point you get dissatisfied with this less than perfect service dispensed perpetually year after year. And their thirst for your monthly rent is reinforced with a punitive penalty and clause that presses you to keep paying and do so as bid by the binding unfairly drawn contract. And then you opt to terminate it within the stipulated frameworks but before you are done, you meet the rude shock, that your rent deposit in its whopping amount will be utilized entirely in carrying out the repairs in the house. What repairs? then the list is faithfully drawn with items too foreign for any resident of planet earth. You have been duped my friend.

Estate Agents are the most philistine con – artists. They exploit and extort money from tenants in the most unkind of ways and the Rent Restriction Act cannot help since the Kenyan public is ignorant and the rent tribunal barely knows its mandate. These Estate Agencies should be subject to state scrutiny and checks and balances put in place to cushion the Kenyan Public. Otherwise these uneducated, undeserving and arrogant businesses that know better to circumvent the chain and cut a piece of the pie without adding an inch of value will continue hurting innocent Kenyans.