The good, the bad and the outright ugly in my city house-hunting mission

Mission: To find a two-bedroomed house that can meet a writer’s fancy, his wife’s pursuit of a “wow” factor in a building (whatever that means) and which is conducive for a two-year-old boy who spends his waking hours courting trouble for fun. The house should preferably have a compound of its own and should ideally not be in a storeyed building.

Preferred area: Any place along Nairobi’s Route 23, which the family is most conversant with. Also, the route’s matatus have not yet discovered lewd music videos.

Expectation: I will find a house after a few attempts.

Reality: For the search period between February 10 and March 24, 2019, I hop from court to court, paying thousands of shillings in “viewing fees” to agents, nearly get conned twice by Web-based schemers, and I notice interesting things house owners are doing in their quest to mint the most from the spaces they have.

For instance on Sunday March 24, the last day of my search, I find myself in Uhuru Estate, one of the residences with houses owned by the City County.

Owners pay rent to the devolved government then charge a higher fee to tenants. A fast-talking agent wants me to see this two-bedroomed house whose rent is Sh17,000 a month. It has an own compound, he says. I should love it, he adds.

CRAMMED

Though it is in a surrounding one can call ghetto due to many unplanned structures, the house appears lovely from the outset, until I see the room that is supposed to be the second bedroom. It is an iron sheet structure annexed to the original building, whose designers had all intentions to make a one-bedroomed house.

To make matters worse, the owners have decided that a space that was intended to be the compound is too big and it can accommodate one more iron sheet structure. It is under construction as we arrive and, if I take up this house, my neighbours will be an iron-sheet wall away.

This is some ingenious problem-solving by the owners to make the most of the space but the crammed space turns me off. Regardless, the agent still wants his Sh1,000 viewing fee, but I haggle my way onto paying him Sh500.

On that same Sunday, before heading to the Uhuru Estate house, I make a stop at a one-bedroomed house on the front-end of Buruburu Phase I, a place nicknamed “Pioneer”.

As expected of Buruburu, the house is an extension of the main structure, a relic of a bygone season where house owners in the estate — which was developed between the 1970s to the 1990s for middle-class Kenyans — started sacrificing their spacious compounds to erect extensions that can be let out.

The one-bedroomed house is vacant and, if I take it, the woman who opens the gate after some unyielding knocking of the gate by the watchman will be my neighbour on the opposite door.

NOT BOARDING

She explains to me the levies they pay on top of the Sh12,000 rent, like Sh300 for garbage collection and Sh500 for the guards. Pretty standard, these. But there is one oddity: Their recurrent expenses include buying a chemical to kill cockroaches.

Until she explains that, I have been thinking the many dead cockroaches on the ground — and some lying dead in various rooms of my would-be house — were vanquished after a regular weekend fumigation. But no, these insects “emerge” from a manhole every night.

The hole, about the size of a foolscap, is between my would-be house and hers. It “oozes” multitudes of cockroaches, she tells me. And we are talking about the giant cockroach variety; the ones capable of unleashing real terror on a household. It appears like they breed somewhere upstream then crawl through the waste tunnels looking for any openings.

“Unless we place an insecticide in the hole, they will swarm into the house in their numbers and you will find lots of them in your house in the morning,” she says, adding that they cannot seal the manhole as it is useful during unclogging of the drainage system.

Immediately she says that, I know I will not be boarding. I cannot stand a single small cockroach. What of hundreds of gigantic roaches on a mission to get a better diet than the waste they eat in the underworld?

Where there are no cockroaches, there are Web-based con artists. In my OLX account, there is a notification the online listing firm sent me on March 15 with the subject: “Suspicious user detected’.”

“This person has been removed from OLX. Please don’t communicate with the user or exchange any money or items. Contact us for more support,” says the notification.

ALMOST CONNED

He had listed a three-bedroomed house in Buruburu Phase 5 that has an own compound, going for Sh25,000. That is a bargain in that neighbourhood and although it is beyond my budget, its features pique my interest. I get his number from the site and call him. He says the house is available. Can I see it right away? He says there is a son of his at the premises.

On reaching the gate to the court he referred to, the guard who attends to us shakes his head when we tell him which house we have come to view. The owner is abroad, he says. It has not been inhabited for a while and he believes this is the reason con men have found it a prime playing field.

I don’t know what to believe, and so I call this “owner” and put him on loudspeaker. Just two questions in and the watchman confirms his fears. I leave, relieved. I could have lost at least Sh50,000 if I fell into this man’s trap, because he had tried to convince me to pay up fast so I can beat any competitors.

The notification from OLX might imply that some people might have fallen victim and thus reported him, or maybe the owner of the house was alerted and took action.

Which reminds me of another house I saw on an online listing platform whose rent also seemed a bargain, given the furnishing done in the interiors. I grew sceptical after talking to the gentleman who had placed the listing and did a reverse image search of some of the photos he had posted. The Google result was that the same images had been used to advertise houses in at least three other locations in Nairobi. This must be a con.

ODD CONTRACTS

My search is almost over on March 16 when I find a house in Buruburu that my family believes ticks all the right boxes. My wife says she can breathe air inside that spacious house (as if she has been breathing LPG in the other houses we have viewed!). The boy can’t help jumping all over the house, which we count as an approval.

I call the landlady and tell her I would love to take it up. She wants me to view the contract and sign it and we will be in business. It is a four-page document and, even if it is the first rent agreement I have seen, I cannot help spotting disagreeable clauses.

Two provisions in the agreement require me to promise that in case I commit an offence, I can be evicted without notice. That might mean being told to leave the house at midnight if she suspects we have used a jiko in the kitchen, one of the offences she has clearly listed in the contract.

I prod her further on this and she does not seem apologetic. Red flag; I don’t take up the house.

I later talk with an employee of the Rent Restriction Tribunal who tells me I would have been toast if I signed that agreement.

“It will mean that you voluntarily agreed to be evicted without notice. The rent tribunal will be unlikely to intervene if she does that,” says the woman, who I will not name because she was not speaking in official capacity.

As I write this, the house is yet to be occupied and I imagine no one is willing to sign a paper granting permission to the landlady to evict him or her without notice.

REPRIEVE AT LAST

My search ends on March 24 when I find a house that is not the biggest, not the most modern, not the fanciest, but it has a grandmotherly landlady and her elderly husband who have “adopted” me as their son. The landlady has prayed that the next time I move houses, I will be going to my own house. Amen.

Besides, their contract is a one-page document, phew! And it has no clause for eviction without notice.

As I settle in my new address, I have been taking stock of the many agents I paid during the search and whether technology could have made that process easier.

In fact, there is a house I was so close to settling in on February 18, but I just calculated the amount I would pay to the agent and I gave up.

For a house whose rent is Sh20,000, he was asking for Sh6,000 as commission. Yes, they make the process of finding houses easy; but I did not think this man deserved anything more than the Sh1,000 viewing fees I had paid him.

And they are masters in vague information, these agents. You could be looking for a house just in front of you but because they want their viewing fees, they will only give generalities when asked about the location.

Owing to that vagueness, I am trying to forgive an agent who took me to a one-storeyed house where the ground floor is occupied by a bar. I could not have given the house one look if he described it well in advance.

I encountered landlords who just won’t allow agents market their property, and they all seemed to suggest that agents can be a nuisance.

The agents I dealt with seemed to be living well on the quick cash that comes their way. All he needs to do is write “x-BEDROOM VACANT” on a poster and append his phone number, then paste those posters all over. Then phone calls will fly in, where he reminds the caller of Sh1,000 viewing fees before committing to help. Weekends are their peak days, when they can show a single house to numerous people and reap big.

Tech-savvy investors have in the past created platforms to help do away with the nagging agents, but owing to the hands-on nature of locating vacant rental houses, none has been able to carry out the task exhaustively. In my search, I used OLX and Facebook which were often rich sources of information but had a limited scope. Over to you, techies.