Polaris Residency, Kindaruma Road: what a unit here earns furnished and unfurnished

Polaris Residency sits on Kindaruma Road in Kilimani, twin towers, complete and letting. If you own here, the single most consequential number you will see is not the asking rent. It is the distance between two asking rents for the identical apartment: about KES 60,000 a month unfurnished, and KES 100,000 to 140,000 furnished. Everything else in this guide is really about which side of that gap your specific unit belongs on, and what it costs you to get there.

What the building is

• Location: Kindaruma Road, Kilimani, with onward access to Argwings Kodhek Road and Ngong Road. Agents publish it at about a minute from Carrefour Kilimani and two minutes from Yaya Centre
• Form: twin towers. Height is published as both sixteen and seventeen storeys depending on the agent, and the block layouts differ, with one listing describing seven units per floor in one block and ten in the other
• Scale: one agent puts the development at 289 units. No other listing we read repeats that figure, so treat it as indicative rather than established, but the order of magnitude matters more than the digit and every source agrees this is a lot of apartments
• Unit mix: one bedroom at about 650 square feet or 60 square metres, one bedroom plus study at 670 to 750 square feet, two bedroom at 970 to 1,150 square feet
• Sale prices: published from KES 6 million for a one bedroom, KES 7.2 to 7.7 million for a one bedroom plus study, and KES 9.2 to 9.7 million for a two bedroom
• Amenities: borehole and water storage, backup generator, fully equipped gym, landscaped garden and children’s play area, high speed lifts, ample parking, access control, CCTV and electric perimeter fencing, with internet and DSTV provision. One listing also claims a swimming pool and a rooftop terrace, which the others do not mention

That last disagreement is worth settling before you price anything. A pool is a real differentiator in a Kilimani short let listing and an expensive thing to imply if the building does not have one.

The gap between the two asking rents

What does an apartment at Polaris Residency rent for?

Here is the thing that should shape your decision. The same 650 square foot one bedroom appears in the market at KES 60,000 a month unfurnished and, at various agents, KES 100,000, KES 140,000, or KES 5,000 a night furnished. Even taking the lowest furnished figure, the spread is two thirds of the unfurnished rent.

A furnishing budget that would be reckless against a KES 5,000 rent difference is trivial against a KES 40,000 one. The gap is large enough to change what you should spend, not just what you should ask.

Be careful about what those furnished numbers are. They are asking rents published by agents with units to let, and they assume a standard of furnishing, photography and day to day management that becomes entirely your problem the moment you commit. They were never a floor. What they do establish is that the market in this building rewards presentation far more than it rewards a keen unfurnished price, and that is the useful part.

How to price against comparables rather than against a brochure is in pricing a Nairobi rental, and the decision itself is in furnished against unfurnished.

Your competition is the rest of the building

Two towers of predominantly one bedroom apartments, completed together, a large share of them bought by investors at KES 6 million rather than by people intending to live in them. Those owners took keys in the same window and a lot of them listed for rent in the same months.

This changes how a tenant decides. Somebody looking for a one bed near Yaya will see three or four in an afternoon and several of them will be in your building, with the same floor plan and the same finish. Shown the same apartment four times, they do not choose on rent. A difference of KES 3,000 a month is not what separates those units, and cutting your asking rent by that much mostly signals that you will cut it again.

Our wider read on this submarket, and on which parts of Nairobi have absorbed the most new stock, is in where the oversupply actually is and how the Kilimani apartment market is changing.

Furnished or unfurnished, nightly or yearly

Should I furnish my Polaris Residency apartment?

For a one bedroom here, the case is strong, and the reason is the thing that hurts the unit on a long unfurnished let. A 650 square foot apartment with a layout repeated dozens of times up the same two towers cannot win a tenancy on space, so unfurnished it is stuck competing on price against its own neighbours. Furnished, it competes on presentation, and presentation is the one variable an owner fully controls.

For a two bedroom at 970 to 1,150 square feet the question is genuinely open. Those units have enough room to differentiate on layout and light against the rest of the building, which is exactly what a long unfurnished tenancy rewards, and KES 85,000 from a tenant on a one year lease with two months deposit is a quieter business than a furnished unit with turnover.

What furnishing a Nairobi apartment actually costs, package by package, is in apartment furnishing packages.

The short stay case, and its honest limits

Kilimani is a real short stay market. Our own letting data for the area puts a well presented unit at USD 90 to 130 a night at 62 to 74 percent occupancy across a full year, on demand that is a mix of corporate, NGO, regional business travel and medical visitors drawn by the hospitals and clinics around Argwings Kodhek. Polaris has the borehole, the generator, the lifts, the parking and the access control that guests notice, and it is walkable to Yaya and Carrefour.

Two honest limits. The first is that those bands describe a well presented and well managed unit, not an average one, and in a building with this many identical apartments the distance between the two is wide. The second is that a one bedroom at KES 100,000 furnished on a long let is a perfectly good outcome that requires no guest communication, no cleaning turnover and no nightly pricing, and a number of owners here will be better served by it than by a short let they manage badly.

The arithmetic on both routes is in short let against long term rental, and what Kilimani does specifically, street by street, is in the Kilimani host guide.

Owning here over the long run

Is Polaris Residency a good building to own in?

On services, yes, and that is not a small thing in Nairobi. A borehole and real water storage, a generator that actually runs the lifts, and controlled access remove most of the recurring irritations of apartment living here, and they are the things a tenant or a guest notices in the first week rather than at the viewing.

The difficulty is not quality. It is scale and sameness. Owning one of a great many near identical one bedrooms means the market sets your rent and your job is to be in the top quarter of your own building rather than to beat Kilimani. Owners who understand that do well here. Owners who expect the sales brochure rent to arrive on its own do not.

Also check the service charge collection rate in the block before you budget. In a heavily investor owned building, owners who are not receiving rent often stop paying the levy, and deferred maintenance in the common areas turns up in every viewing you host. What the charge should cover, and what it should not, is in service charge explained.

What to do if yours is empty

1. Ask for the viewing count before you touch the rent. No viewings is a marketing fault, viewings without offers is a presentation or pricing fault, and the two have different fixes
2. Find out how many units your agent holds here. An agent letting six one beds in these towers has no reason to care which one lets, and you have no way of knowing whether yours was shown first or not at all
3. Photograph it in daylight and publish a floor plan. It costs less than a week of the void and it is the highest return thing available to you in a building where most listings are dark phone photographs of the same layout
4. Publish the real service charge. Tenants filter on total monthly cost, so hiding it buys you fewer and worse qualified viewings
5. Price the furnished route properly rather than drifting. Given the published spread, a half furnished unit is the one outcome that appeals to nobody
6. Stop competing on rent alone. Against dozens of identical apartments a cut is matched within a week, and you have reset the achievable rent for the whole building including yourself

The general version of this diagnosis is in why your Nairobi rental keeps going vacant.

If you are looking to rent here rather than let

A fair share of people searching this building are tenants. Polaris is a sensible place to rent if you want to be inside walking distance of Yaya and Carrefour with a borehole, a generator, a lift and controlled access, which together remove most of what makes Nairobi apartment living tiresome.

Use the building’s own arithmetic. There are a lot of near identical units and some of them have been empty a while. Ask how long the specific apartment has been vacant, view more than one, and negotiate on what costs the owner nothing to give, which is the deposit structure, the lease length and whether it comes furnished. Published terms here run to one month upfront and two months deposit on a one year lease, and an owner three months into a void will move on terms before they move on rent. If you want us to tell you what is genuinely available here and in the blocks around it, find a home is where to start.

How Goldstay handles it

We let and manage in Kilimani, long term and short stay, and we sold nothing in this building, so we have no rent projection of our own to defend. We charge 10 percent of rent collected on a long let and 20 percent of revenue on a short stay, with no setup fee and no exit fee, and we will tell you before you commit which of the two your unit is actually suited to. For a one bedroom here that answer is usually furnished, and it is not always short stay.

We will also tell you to stay where you are if that is the right answer. A unit with thirty viewings and no offer does not need a different agent, it needs different photographs and a floor plan, and nobody should be paid a commission for saying so.

If your apartment at Polaris is empty, send it to us with the floor, the block and the layout, and we will come back with an achievable rent, an honest view of how long it will take, and whether furnishing earns its cost on your specific unit. What tenant finding and long term management cover is set out in full, and if the answer is nightly, that is Airbnb management.

Related reading: Kilimani against Hurlingham, how we screen tenants and what the 2026 handover wave does to rents. For the same problem in the other submarket where a great many identical units completed at once, see Shangri-La Residency.