Do you actually need a property manager in Nairobi?

We are a management company, so treat what follows accordingly. But we turn work away most months, usually from landlords whose situation does not need us, and it is worth writing down why. A fee paid for management you could do yourself in an hour a month is a straight deduction from your yield. A fee avoided on a property that genuinely needs managing tends to cost several times what the fee would have been.

The short answer

It turns on three things, and none of them is the size or value of the property: how far away you are, whether the let is long-term or nightly, and how many units you have. If you live in Nairobi, own one flat, and it is let long-term to a tenant who pays, you probably do not need a manager. Change any one of those three and the answer starts to move.

Distance and letting type decide this. Not the value of the property, which is what most people think they are deciding on.

When you genuinely do not need one

These are the cases where we would tell you to keep your money, and where taking you on would be selling you something you do not need.

• You live in Nairobi and own one long-let unit with a sitting tenant. The work is a bank transfer to reconcile, a KRA filing, and two or three maintenance calls a year. That is an hour a month, and at 10 percent of a decent Kilimani rent you would be paying well over a thousand dollars a year for that hour.
• Your tenant is a long-standing one who pays on time.The largest single thing a manager does is stand between you and tenant problems. If you do not have tenant problems, you are buying insurance against a risk that has not materialised in years.
• You let to a corporate or an institution on a full repairing lease. Where the tenant maintains the unit and pays reliably by standing order, there is very little left to manage.
• You are in Nairobi and genuinely enjoy it. Some landlords like knowing their building, their caretaker and their tenant. That is a real advantage and no manager reproduces it.

In three of those four cases, the thing actually worth buying is not management. It is a one-off tenant find when the current tenant leaves, which is a different and much cheaper transaction.

When you almost certainly do

1. You are outside Kenya. This is the big one, and the reason is not admin. It is that every problem in a Nairobi property is solved by somebody physically turning up, and that somebody cannot be you at short notice from Dubai. A caretaker who reports to nobody is not a substitute, and a relative doing you a favour is a relationship you are quietly spending.
2. The unit is on Airbnb or let nightly. Short-stay is not a lighter version of long-let, it is a hospitality operation: guest messages at all hours, turnover cleans between stays, pricing that has to move weekly, and a review score that punishes every miss permanently. Self-managing this remotely is not difficult so much as incompatible with having a job.
3. You have three or more units. At that point the arithmetic reverses. The fee stops competing with your spare time and starts competing with the cost of the voids, arrears and deferred maintenance that accumulate when nobody is systematically responsible.
4. You are already in arrears or in dispute. If the tenant has stopped paying and you are abroad, the practical question is who attends, serves notice and appears at the tribunal. It is not a question you can answer with an app.
5. The property is empty and has been for a while. A void is the most expensive state a property can be in, and it usually persists because nobody is showing the unit to anybody.

The arithmetic the fee has to earn back

Take a well-finished two-bedroom in Kilimani let long-term at USD 1,500 a month, which is the example we use on our pricing page. At 10 percent the management fee is USD 150 a month, so USD 1,800 over a year. That is the number the manager has to earn back before they have done anything for you at all.

Set against it, one avoided month of void is worth USD 1,500 on its own, which very nearly covers the annual fee from a single event. A second avoided void month covers it twice over. That is the whole case in one line, and it is why the calculation is so different for a landlord whose flat sits empty for two months between tenants than for one whose tenant has been in place for four years.

The other side of the ledger is worth being equally honest about. If your unit does not go void, your tenant pays, and nothing breaks, the manager has earned the fee by doing the admin and being available. That is a real service and for a landlord abroad it is often worth USD 1,800. For a landlord in Kilimani with a spare hour a month, it is not.

The Airbnb question is a different question

Short-stay management runs 15 to 25 percent of revenue rather than 8 to 15 percent of rent, so the fee is materially larger and the honest threshold is higher. What justifies it is that the work is genuinely continuous and that the manager is being paid to move a number you can see: occupancy and nightly rate. A long-let manager mostly protects against downside. A short-let manager is expected to produce upside, and you can hold them to it monthly.

The version of this that almost never works is the owner abroad self-managing a Nairobi Airbnb through a cleaner and a WhatsApp group. It works for a few months, the review score erodes, and the listing drops down the rankings in a way that is slow and expensive to reverse. What that looks like in practice is set out in why Nairobi Airbnb hosts are losing money.

The middle option nobody offers you

The choice is usually presented as full management or nothing, and for a lot of Nairobi landlords the right answer sits between them. Tenant finding on its own is a one-time fee of one month’s rent: we market the unit, vet the applicants, verify employment and previous landlords, draw the tenancy and hand you a tenant. After that you manage, because you live here and it is an hour a month.

That is the arrangement we would recommend to most resident landlords with one flat, and we say so knowing it earns us a fraction of what management would. It is also the arrangement that most reliably turns into management later, when the second unit arrives or the landlord moves abroad.

What we would tell you

If you are in Nairobi with one long-let unit and a tenant who pays: do not hire us, and call us when the tenant leaves. If you are abroad, or running nightly lets, or holding three or more units, or currently in arrears or sitting on a void: the fee is very likely the cheapest line in your P and L, and the question is which manager rather than whether.

If it is the second, the next thing to read is the questions to ask before you sign, which includes our own answers so you can compare us against whoever else you are considering. If you are still at the stage of working out who to approach, property management companies in Nairobi covers the kinds of firm and how each of them prices.

Related reading: what management costs in Kenya, what management actually gets you and why it matters more for diaspora landlords. If the answer turned out to be yes, how to find a property manager in Nairobi covers where to look.