Part of our Complete Guide to Buying Property in Kenya and our First-Time Home Buyer series. See also our guides on how much money you need to buy a house in Nairobi and the step-by-step process of buying your first home in Kenya. When you are buying your first home in Kenya, very few decisions carry as much weight as how you plan to pay for it. Should you take a mortgage and spread payments over...

Part of our Complete Guide to Buying Property in Kenya and our First-Time Home Buyer series. See also our guides on how much money you need to buy a house in Nairobi and hidden costs when buying property in Kenya. There is a specific kind of financial stress that arrives in the first year of apartment ownership in Nairobi, and it is almost entirely predictable and almost entirely avoidable. It is the...

Part of our Complete Guide to Buying Property in Kenya and our First-Time Home Buyer series. See also our guides on how much money you need to buy a house in Nairobi and the step-by-step process of buying your first home in Kenya. Every year, Kenyan property buyers reach the completion stage of a transaction and discover that they do not have enough money to proceed. Not because the property price...

Part of our Complete Guide to Buying Property in Kenya and our First-Time Home Buyer series. See also our guides on the step-by-step process of buying your first home in Kenya and hidden costs when buying property in Kenya. The most common reason first-time buyers in Nairobi stall or fail at the final stages of a property purchase is not that they chose the wrong property or picked the wrong location....

Part of our Complete Guide to Buying Property in Kenya and our First-Time Home Buyer series. See also our guides on how much money you need to buy a house in Nairobi and hidden costs when buying property in Kenya. Buying your first home in Kenya is genuinely exciting and genuinely complicated, and the two feelings usually arrive at the same time. The excitement comes from what the purchase represents:...

Buying property in Kenya is one of the most significant financial decisions most people will make in their lifetime, and it is also one of the most process-intensive. The journey from "I want to buy a property" to holding a title deed in your name involves budgeting, property search, due diligence, financing, a legal conveyancing process, the payment of government taxes and fees, registration at the Lands...

Part of the Legal and Financial Guide to Buying Property in Kenya: Article 10 of our 10-part Property Laws in Kenya series. Every concept, statute, and legal principle covered in this series comes down to one practical moment: the point at which a buyer must decide whether a specific property is safe to acquire. That decision depends on due diligence. Done properly, due diligence reveals every material...

Part of the Legal and Financial Guide to Buying Property in Kenya: Article 8 of our 10-part Property Laws in Kenya series. Most property buyers in Kenya focus their due diligence on two questions: is the title registered and clean, and is the price fair? Both are important. But there is a third category of risk that a clean title and a fair price cannot protect against, and it sits in the gap between...

Part of the Legal and Financial Guide to Buying Property in Kenya: Article 7 of our 10-part Property Laws in Kenya series. Two government powers over private land generate more anxiety among Kenyan property owners than almost any other legal topic. The first is compulsory acquisition: the government's power to take privately owned land for public purposes regardless of whether the owner wants to sell....

Part of the Legal and Financial Guide to Buying Property in Kenya: Article 6 of our 10-part Property Laws in Kenya series. Two questions that arise with significant frequency in Kenya's property market in 2026 receive surprisingly inconsistent answers from agents, developers, and even some advisers. The first: does this land transaction require Land Control Board consent? The second: can a foreigner own...