How to find a property manager in Nairobi

The difficulty with finding a managing agent is that searching for one surfaces whoever spends most on being found, and spending on marketing correlates with almost nothing you care about. The product here is reliability over years, and reliability does not advertise well. What follows is where landlords who ended up happy actually looked.

The short answer

Work from evidence you can see towards claims you have to take on trust. That means starting with buildings and people already in front of you, and finishing with firms whose only evidence is their own website. Almost everybody does this in the opposite order, which is why the first two routes below are so underused.

You are not looking for the best property manager in Nairobi. You are looking for one who is demonstrably good at the specific thing your property needs.

The six places to look

1. The best-run building you can get into. If there is a block in Kilimani or Lavington that visibly works, where the lifts run, the compound is clean, the bins are managed and the water does not fail, somebody is managing it competently. Ask the caretaker or the management committee who. This is the only route where you assess the work before you meet the salesperson.
2. Other landlords in your own building. Your service charge meeting or owners’ WhatsApp group contains several people solving your exact problem in the same building, with the same water supply, the same tenants and the same county. Ask who they use and, more usefully, who they left and why. The second question produces better information than the first.
3. Property advocates. Conveyancing and property lawyers in Nairobi see the aftermath of bad management: the deposit disputes, the tribunal filings, the agent who cannot account for eight months of rent. They know which names recur and they have no commercial reason to flatter anyone. If you used an advocate on your purchase, this is a free and very well-informed referral.
4. Firms that publish their terms. A firm that puts its fee, its response time and its notice period in writing before you have spoken to anybody has made claims you can compare and hold them to. A firm that will not quote until you call is reserving the right to price you rather than the work, and you will not find out where you landed in that range.
5. Your bank or diaspora network, with scepticism.Kenyan banks and diaspora associations often maintain lists of property partners. These are commercial relationships rather than endorsements, so treat the list as a source of names and do the verification yourself. It is still a better starting set than a search result.
6. The letting boards on units like yours. Walk or street-view the streets around your property and note which agents are actually letting units of your size and standard. An agent visibly transacting in your micro-market knows your rent level and your tenant pool. One who mostly sells land in Kitengela does not, whatever the website says.

Where not to look

• The first page of results, taken on its own. Useful for assembling names, worthless as a ranking. It tells you who invested in being visible, which is a marketing budget rather than an operational record. Use it to build the list, not to order it.
• Firms with no physical office you can visit.Everything that goes wrong with a Nairobi property is fixed by somebody turning up. An agent you cannot visit is an agent who may not be able to visit your tenant either.
• Anybody whose pitch is the lowest percentage.Nairobi long-term management runs roughly 8 to 15 percent of collected rent. Meaningfully below that band, something has been removed from the service, and the usual thing removed is the inspection. Whether you even need full management is worth settling first in do you actually need a property manager.
• A relative who will do it as a favour. This is not a management arrangement, it is a relationship you are quietly spending, and it has no mechanism for being held to anything. It works until the first time you have to complain to someone you will see at Christmas.

Shortlist three, and brief them identically

Three is the right number: enough to see a range, few enough that you actually read the replies. Pick them from different types of firm rather than three of the same kind. The sales-led agency, the boutique manager and the one-person operator price and behave differently, and how property management companies in Nairobi differ sets out what to expect from each. The important discipline is sending all three the same brief, in writing, and asking for the answer in writing. Phone quotes cannot be compared and are not remembered accurately by either party.

Firms that answer that brief in full have told you most of what you need. Firms that answer half of it and ask for a call have also told you something. The reasoning behind each of those asks, and our own answers to them, is in the questions to ask a property manager, and the contract those answers should end up inside is covered in the management agreement clause by clause.

If you already have a manager

Do not give notice until the successor is signed and has a start date. The worst version of this is a landlord in the notice period with nobody appointed and an outgoing agent who has run out of reasons to care. The sequence, and the notice letter itself, are in how to terminate a property management agreement.

Where we fit

We are one of the firms in route four: the fee is published rather than quoted on a call, at 10 percent of collected rent for long-term management and 20 percent of revenue for short let, with no setup fee, no commission from contractors, no letting fee at renewal and nothing payable to leave. There are written consequences behind it rather than only a service description, including waiving a property’s fee for the month if we miss a 48 hour response.

We would rather you ran the first three routes before talking to us. If the best-run building near you is managed by someone else and the owners in it are happy, that is worth more than our website, and we would rather you found that out now than in a year.

Related reading: what management in Nairobi actually gets you, what it costs and where to find an Airbnb co-host.