To many Kenyans dreaming of owning homes, the property firm that was set up in October 2015 known as Simple Homes was a gift from heaven!
It’s pay model was simple: all you had to do was pay for the house using your rent.
According to The Standard, HPP allowed those shopping for houses to tailor repayments to their incomes and current rent. For instance, if one pays Sh30,000 rent, the firm promised to find them a plan that fits within that amount.
However, there were those who saw behind the scheme and tried to warn Kenyans. The home ownership plan was simply too good to be actualized, but few heeded.
It all started when a Facebook user named Martin Tairo Maseghe wrote: “If you booked Nambalee Court in Embakasi, a project by Simple Homes, have your passport and visa ready for the site visit which will happen in South Africa.”
It was quickly established that the company sourced photographs from the Internet and posted them, claiming they were photographs of their ongoing projects in Kenya.
According to The Standard, Simple Homes did this through reversed Google image search. “Most of the photographs were lifted from pages of real estate developments in Turkey, USA, South Africa, Australia among other places,” reported the daily newspaper.
Examples of these included Nyati Crescent on Mombasa Road with photographs from a development in Australia and Trojan Residence in Syokimau with photographs from a pipeline company‘s construction site in Kansas City, United States.
The Standard further noted that many of the comments on the Simple Homes page were made by Facebook pages as opposed to Facebook accounts. One individual can have as many pages as possible under one account. Additionally, any negative comment on the company‘s timeline was deleted and the poster blocked instantly.
Another red flag was that clients only paid the deposits and thereafter paid the balances in affordable “rent“ but none of them went for a site visit. The company had no track record, no complete project and no history of owning land or houses.
The Simple Homes website has been discovered to have been designed and administered by one Francis Kithusi. “I am a web designer and was contracted by Lee Rukwaro to do the Simple Homes websites. I did it and was paid. Later, they called and asked me to deactivate it because they got someone else to redesign the site and I had no reason not to oblige. I have no relations with them. I was oblivious of what has been happening with the firm until I started receiving many funny calls from strangers demanding explanations I cannot give,” he told The Standard.
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