HassConsult is delighted to announce the launch of The Hass Property Index, Kenya’s first property Index - a tool that will provide investors, home owners, the financial industry and consumers with information about house price inflation, allowing them to make informed decisions in the housing market and enjoy the best possible returns. We believe the index will also help us all in understanding the Kenyan real estate market, the urban residential market and by extension some of the dynamics within the Kenyan economy, a little better.

In our experience, the best decisions are made with the clearest possible information, and it is by working to flag what is rising, and what falling, that we can do the most in ensuring funds are directed towards the properties that are currently most needed and most sought.

The index data that we are issuing at present represents part of a bigger project by HassConsult with the mission of furthering the transparency and quality of service in Kenyan real estate. We do not see this as an end-point, but as a beginning, with an entry index that we intend to expand and deepen over time.

Indeed, we would hope that the initiative we have taken in this would see other estate agencies join us in contributing data to progressively achieve the fullest and most detailed picture possible of our market. We believe this is an important contribution that we can make, serving our clients, the financial industry, and all who seek to understand and participate in furthering the development of the Kenyan economy.

With our opening index, our first effort has been to capture the pricing trends around actual residences. We were keen to show how supply and demand were playing out for houses and apartments, without the overall index being distorted by the more speculative and longer-term factors associated with development potential.

Obviously, land and property are always valued as investments, as well as for inhabiting. However, this particular index is targeted purely at price changes in urban houses, villas and apartments where the only element driving the price is competition for that property. In compiling our index, we therefore excluded all properties with land plots suitable for development. It is important to make this distinction, in that much of the property pricing movement we have seen in Kenya has been caused by plans for the future. This index therefore captures the pricing of actual residences that cannot be developed further. It is based on data from seven residential areas, all upper-income and middle-income.

We have, further, and as is normal for any index, structured the index according to the composition of residential properties that were actually sold. Nairobi still holds more old and individually built houses than it does property developments and housing estates. However, over the five years we have collated, new developments dominated the sales books. That means that the index reflects much more strongly the pricing of new developments than it does the city’s older and longer-standing housing stock.