1870 West: what to settle before your handover

1870 West is HassConsult’s tower at the crossroads of Lower Kabete and Peponi Roads, next door to Sarit Centre: twenty nine residential floors under a thirtieth floor amenity summit, which will make it among the tallest residential buildings in Nairobi. It is sold out, it was heavily bought by diaspora investors, and it is now published for completion in the fourth quarter of 2026 against an original programme that targeted the fourth quarter of 2025. If you own a unit there, there is one clause in your sale agreement worth finding before you think about anything else, because it may decide who is allowed to let your apartment.

The clause to find before anything else

Published analysis of 1870 West describes a management structure operated by a dedicated company, 1870 West Residences Ltd, with that company handling the letting and the resale of units exclusively, on the stated rationale of standardising tenant quality. HassConsult ’s own marketing for the scheme leans on its property management arm in the same breath as the investment case.

We want to be careful here, because this matters too much to be loose about. What a brochure or a trade article describes is not necessarily what binds you. An exclusive letting mandate is a contractual obligation, and it either appears in your sale agreement and the management company documents or it does not. Plenty of developments describe a dedicated management company as a service on offer, which is a genuinely useful thing and entirely optional. Others make it a condition of sale, sometimes in perpetuity, sometimes for a fixed number of years.

You cannot tell which of those two you have bought from the marketing. You can only tell by reading your own agreement, and almost nobody who bought off plan in 2022 on a three year payment plan has read it since.

So this is the first job, and it is worth doing before handover rather than after. Ask your lawyer, or ask HassConsult directly in writing, and get the answer to these:

• Is the appointment exclusive, or optional? If the word exclusive appears anywhere near letting, everything else on this list matters. If it does not, you are free and the rest of this article is about a different set of decisions
• For how long does it run? A mandate for the first two or three years after handover is a very different proposition from one that attaches to the unit indefinitely and passes to your buyer
• Does it cover short stays as well as long lets? Some mandates cover tenancies only and are silent on nightly letting, which leaves a route open. Others prohibit short letting outright. Given where this building stands, the answer changes the economics materially
• What is the fee, and what is it charged on? A percentage of rent collected and a percentage of rent invoiced are not the same number. Ask which, and ask what is deducted before the percentage is taken
• What happens if you are not satisfied? An exclusive appointment with no performance standard and no exit is the part worth negotiating, and handover is the last moment you have any leverage to do it
• Does it extend to resale? If the same company has the exclusive right to sell your unit as well as let it, you have pre-committed your exit as well as your income

We wrote the same caution about Coco in Brookside, which is the same developer, and the general version is in buying off plan in Nairobi.

What a year of delay is actually worth

The project has been on third party project registers since 2019, was launched to buyers in the early 2020s on a three year payment plan of twenty percent down and instalments after, and ran a thirty six month construction programme slated to finish in the fourth quarter of 2025. The current published completion is the fourth quarter of 2026. Show units opened to the public in July 2026, and the consultants were posting in late August that finishes were progressing floor by floor from the top down and the project was entering its final stages.

For an owner, that gap is not an abstraction. If you bought on the payment plan, you have spent roughly a year making instalments against an asset that was supposed to be producing rent by now, and if you borrowed to do it you have been paying interest across the same period with nothing coming the other way. On a one bedroom at KES 9.4 million in a building beside Sarit Centre, a year of foregone rent is a substantial number in its own right.

Which is why the second document to read is the delay provision in your sale agreement. Most Kenyan off plan agreements contain something: liquidated damages, a rent equivalent credit, an interest abatement on outstanding instalments, or at minimum a defined longstop date after which you have rights. Almost nobody ever claims under these clauses, largely because buyers do not know they are there and because raising it feels combative when you still need the developer to hand you a finished flat.

Our suggestion is narrower than a dispute. Read the clause, work out what it entitles you to, and raise it as a credit against your final instalment rather than as a claim. A developer at the handover stage of a sold out building is far more willing to discuss an instalment adjustment than to write a cheque, and you have more leverage now, while you still owe them money, than you will ever have again once you have paid in full and taken keys.

What to check at the handover itself

Two items here are specific to how this building has been built, and they are worth more than a generic snagging list.

1. Ask for the plumbing pressure test, floor by floor. The consultants have described finishing top down, floor by floor, which is efficient. It is also precisely the sequence in which pipework gets sealed behind tile and drywall, and this exact question was put publicly to the team on their own progress update: was each floor pressure tested and signed off before the finishes closed it in, or does that check only happen at final handover. Ask for your floor’s certificate. A leak found in year two behind a tiled wall in a thirty storey tower is somebody’s expensive argument, and you want documentation that it is not yours
2. Count the lifts and ask their speed and capacity. Twenty nine residential floors above nine floors of parking is a lot of vertical traffic. In a tower this shape, lift provision decides whether the building is pleasant to live in and therefore whether it lets well, and it is fixed forever on the day it is commissioned. Ask how many serve your floor, and what happens when one is down
3. Get the service charge in writing, with a budget. The amenity level, the pools, the gym, the lifts and the security across a building this size are a substantial quarterly bill, and the published structure is quarterly rather than monthly, which matters for your cash flow. Ask for the budget behind the figure and not just the figure, and ask what the reserve fund position will be at handover
4. Establish which floor band you are actually in. The premium units were marketed from the twentieth floor up. Where your unit sits against that line affects both what it lets for and what you should be paying in service charge relative to your neighbours
5. Photograph and list defects before you sign anything. Signing a handover acknowledgment without a defects schedule attached is how a snag becomes your repair. Do it in daylight, with water running, with every socket tested
6. Confirm the parking bay allocation in writing. Nine floors of parking sounds generous until you find your entitlement is one bay and your tenant has two cars. In Westlands this decides lets more often than owners expect

The thing about handing over sold out and all at once

This is the part the handover desk will not raise, and it is the part that most affects what your unit earns in its first year.

A sold out tower with twenty nine residential floors, bought heavily by investors rather than occupiers, hands keys to a great many owners within the same few weeks. A large share of them will list for rent in the same month, in the part of Nairobi where more apartments have been delivered than anywhere comparable. We have written up what that looks like in practice at Shangri-La Residency, a few minutes away, where around eighty units came to market together and owners are still looking for tenants. 1870 West is that situation at several times the scale.

Our own reading of the submarket is that this is survivable and that the mechanism is not what owners assume. Westlands rents have not collapsed. What happens is that the gap between the top and the bottom of the same rent band widens, and an averagely presented unit sits at the bottom of it while a well presented one on the same street lets in a fortnight. Void periods in Westlands are a presentation problem far more often than a pricing problem, and the answer is not to be the cheapest unit in your own building, because a rent cut in a tower of near identical flats is matched within a week and resets the achievable rent for everybody including you.

There is a real advantage here worth using. Being adjacent to Sarit Centre is the single most valuable locational fact about this building, because in Westlands a unit within walking distance of the amenity cluster behaves measurably better than an identical unit in the same postcode that needs a car. Lead with it. The wider context is in the 2026 handover wave and the Westlands guide.

Long let, short stay, or the nominated agent

Assuming you establish that you are free to choose, the honest answer depends on your unit and it is not the same for everyone in the building.

The studios and smaller one bedrooms at 570 square feet face the problem we have described: dozens of near identical flats, no way to differentiate on space, and a tenant viewing four of them in an afternoon. For those, nightly letting is often the stronger business, because size matters much less to a guest than presentation does, and this building has a rooftop amenity level and a walk to Sarit that photograph extremely well. Westlands is the strongest short stay market in Nairobi, at USD 100 to 150 a night and 65 to 75 percent occupancy on corporate, UN and NGO demand that holds midweek and through the low season.

The two bedroom and three bedroom units, and anything above the twentieth floor, have a stronger long let case, because they can actually differentiate on space, light and view against the rest of the tower, and because the corporate and allowance backed tenants who pay the best rents in Westlands want two and three bedrooms. We have written up where that calculation lands in two nearby buildings, and it genuinely goes both ways: Skynest favours nightly letting and GTC Residences favours the long let.

The arithmetic for both is in short let against long term rental, pricing against real comparables is in pricing a Nairobi rental, and the service charge question in management company fees explained.

What to do in the months before keys

1. Read the letting clause. Everything else depends on the answer, and it takes one email to your lawyer
2. Read the delay clause and price it. Raise it as a credit against your final instalment, while you still owe money
3. Get the completion date in writing, with a longstop. A project that has moved once can move again, and if you are coordinating a furnishing budget or a flight from abroad you need a date you can plan against rather than a quarter
4. Decide your route before handover, not after. The furnishing decision follows from it, and furnishing after you have already advertised unfurnished wastes a quarter
5. If you are abroad, appoint someone to attend the handover. This building was sold heavily to diaspora buyers. A handover inspection done by video call finds a fraction of what someone standing in the flat with the taps running will find, and the defects schedule you attach on the day is the one that binds
6. Do not be the first to cut your rent. Decide now that presentation is your lever, because in month three with an empty flat the temptation is to discount, and in a tower like this that helps nobody

How Goldstay handles it

We let and manage apartments in Westlands on both routes, long term at 10 percent of rent collected and short stay at 20 percent of revenue, with no setup fee and no exit fee. We did not sell anything in this building, we are not the nominated agent, and we have no interest in defending a completion date or a rental projection that somebody else published.

If it turns out you are contractually bound to the nominated management company, we will tell you that plainly and we will not try to talk you into breaching your own agreement. What we will do instead is give you the benchmark: what your unit should be achieving, how long it should take to let, and what the fee ought to be, so that you can tell whether the arrangement you are in is serving you. That is worth having whether or not you can act on it, and if the mandate is time limited, it is worth having before it ends.

If you are free to choose, send us the unit with the floor, the layout and the square footage and we will come back with an achievable rent, a realistic time to let, and both the long let and the nightly numbers side by side so you can see which one your specific apartment should be on. Send us the unit is the place to start, and what each service covers is on long term management, Airbnb management and tenant finding.

Related reading: Lower Kabete Road, furnished against unfurnished and Nairobi off plans ranked.