Apartment owners’ joy as title deeds issuing begins
The government has started issuing title deed for your sectional housing unit.
What you need to know:
- Kenyans who purchased single units in apartment blocks can now get legal ownership papers.
- Owners of such properties can use the documents for financial transactions, such as placing them as security for loans.
You can now get a title deed for your sectional housing unit, after the government started issuing ownership documents for such properties, unlocking a huge potential in one of Kenya’s sector with vast opportunities.
Lands Cabinet Secretary Farida Karoney said an estimated 10,000 sectional title deeds will be dished out in Nairobi as part of a pilot phase that kicked off last month.
“We have started with structured buildings like the NSSF-owned properties in Nyayo Embakasi. We want to start with the apartments that are easy to do to see how it plays out in the system. So far, we have had 10 successful transactions,” she told the Nation.
This means that Kenyans who purchased single units in apartment blocks can now get legal ownership papers. Previously, there was no law enabling this.
The new Sectional Properties Act, whose regulations were passed by Parliament in December, allowed the issuing of titles to such units.
Security for loans
“That’s a big achievement for us because it will allow us to bring more sectional properties on board, not just for our customers to transact, but to also make it easier for other agencies of government such as KRA to collect property taxes,” the CS said.
The development also means that owners of such properties can use the documents for financial transactions, such as placing them as security for loans. The Lands ministry says more revenue will be unlocked when the properties are included on its platform.
“Before December 2021, you couldn’t transact on your sectional units because we could not have uploaded them onto the platform. Now those customers who are mostly doing charges and discharges have come onto the platform and now they have a sectional title and are transacting,” Ms Karoney said.
More Kenyans have embraced ownership of individual housing units with the government’s focus on growing affordable housing.
Officials estimate that there are about 100,000 sectional property units in Nairobi alone.
“We intend to have all the sectional units on the platform and that will increase the number of transactable properties in the Nairobi registry,” said the Lands CS.
