[Source: The Standard, by Macharia Kamau]
Apartment owners will now hold individual title deeds under a radical new plan proposed by the government.
The Sectional Properties Bill of 2019, which is currently before Parliament and championed by Lands and Physical Planning, seeks to address the legal loopholes that have exposed flat owners to unscrupulous property developers.
The Bill, which would repeal the Sectional Properties Act of 1987, aims to give the owner of an apartment more power than what is currently vested in management companies. If it goes through as it is currently proposed, apartment owners will have an absolute right to the property.
Currently, apartment owners do not own the land underneath their units, and hold no title to show ownership of their houses.
They, however, own a share of the management company, which in turn owns the land. However, Kenya’s real estate market has been plagued by reports of some property developers using the mother title to take bank loans. In the case of default, the banks then come after the apartments.
Lands Cabinet Secretary Farida Karoney declined to go into details about the extent of risks that apartment owners grapple with, but said the Bill would deal with such cases.
Many relatively new homeowners buying up the numerous apartments sprouting up across the country’s landscape are not aware that unless the properties’ mother title is locked to ensure it cannot be used in a transaction without the consensus of all the owners, they are exposed to a number of risks that could quickly turn their investments into nothing but ‘air space’.
The Sectional Properties Bill proposes closure of the mother title and instead issuance of individual titles to apartment owners which, according to lawyer Polycarp Moriasi, will protect buyers from property developers “who hold on to ownership arbitrarily even after selling off the units to end purchasers”.
[Full article: The Standard, by Macharia Kamau]
