Houses on Auction in Kenya: Housing Finance has placed houses worth Sh. 527 million located upcountry up for sale. This has effectively pushed the amount that HF is looking to recover to Sh. 2.5 billion.
These houses are located in Mombasa, Nakuru, Eldoret and Kisumu. Others are located in counties such as Nyandarua County.
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“The move to sell the houses, which the bank’s managing director Robert Kibaara has termed an ongoing exercise, is meant to trim the lender’s stock of bad loans that grew to Sh. 12.97 billion at the end of March from Sh. 8.47 billion a year earlier. The lender said in its 2019 annual report that these non-performing loans are predominantly the result of developers it had financed being unable to service their debts. Many of them failed to realize projected sales revenue, attributed to the slowdown in the real estate sector,” says a report that appeared in the Business Daily on Monday.
The report further says that the majority of the houses on sale are in the Coast region. In this region, HF is looking to recover Sh. 394.2 million from the sale of 15 properties.
“The most expensive property on sale in the Coast is a Sh. 70 million private residence with a main house and two cottages in Mtwapa, sitting on 6.99 acres. There are four properties on sale in Central Kenya — Kipipiri, Imenti, Ol Kalou and Gatundu — targeting to raise Sh. 63.45 million. In Eldoret, Nakuru and Kisumu, HF is seeking Sh69.7 million from the sale of seven properties. In the sales for Nairobi and its environs, the lender is selling 54 properties – mainly standalone houses and apartments — with reserve prices ranging from Sh. 3.4 million to Sh. 300 million,” the report says. “Non-performing loans attributable to the real estate sector have risen three-fold in the past five years, from Sh. 12.66 billion in 2014 to Sh. 43.5 billion as at September last year.”
