Old law opens new doors

The Great wall apartments at Mlolongo on Mombasa Road Many home-buyers have been shunning apartments.

A barely used piece of legislation enacted 13 years ago could hold the key to owning homes for many Kenyans.

But experts say utilisation of the Sectional Properties Act 1987 has been slow due to a misunderstanding by property owners and buyers over its application.

The law allows multiple ownership of a building, which would make it possible – and cheaper – for different individuals to own houses on the same property like apartment.

“The Sectional Properties Act 1987 was enacted to enable sub-division and registration of a building both horizontally and vertically for each defined area of cubic airspace, thus leading to individual unit owners getting title and leases for the rooms they occupy,” says Mr Daniel Ichang’i, the chairman of Association of Professional Societies in East Africa (APSEA).

He says the title of the rooms, just like that of land, can be transferred, charged or mortgaged enabling more economic development.

The surveyors, who held a workshop recently on infrastructure development, said the problem of housing would worsen in major urban areas with the establishment of counties, and called for innovative ways to meet the expected increase in demand for housing.

The cost of houses has gone through the roof in many towns due to the rising cost of land, locking out many people from home ownership, according to the surveyors. This, they said, could partly be solved by invoking the Sectional Properties Act to encourage ownership of rooms on the flats.

According to government statistics, the country requires 150,000 every year, but only an average of 50,000 is achieved. “There has been poor public sensitisation and lack of technical capacity,” said Mr Ibrahim Mwathane, a former chairman of Institution of Surveyors of Kenya.

Surveyors note that while some would love to sell part of their flats, but buyers are mostly are held back by fears of what would happen if a dispute arose between the different owners.

“We should educate people that owning flats are similar to owning land. By having people owning houses in flats we have expanded the land vertically,” said David Macoco, a former dean at University of Nairobi.

In the arrangement of sectional properties, the common facility areas are stated in the agreement. The surveyors said failure to use this law to accelerate ownership of houses was also denying the public the opportunity to share facilities like gyms and swimming pools that would be expensive to establish individually.

The Act provides that the common property be registered in the sectional plan and held by all unit owners as tenants in shares proportional to their respective units.