A study done on the Westlands property market by Data-Fintech, a data firm in Kenya, detailing price movements over the past 12 months to August 2017 shows that 3 bedroom apartments for sale had the highest price gain in the area. The study which compared the performance of three sub markets, apartment, townhouse and houses using data from major online real estate portals in the country revealed that the average change in price across the three sub-markets was up 4.8 per cent. Apartment prices in the area were up 20 per cent compared to the same quarter in 2016 while townhouses were down -5.6 percent in comparison to the previous year. However, normal houses remained the same.
As for 3 bedroom properties for rent, apartments had the highest decline in rental prices owing to the increased supply in the area from new units coming into the market. The rent for town houses went down just 1.4 per from 2016 cent while rent for houses increased by 2.6 per cent. However, the average rent across the three categories for a three bedroom property are down 1.8 per cent.
Over the past 12 months, apartments gave the highest rental yields in the area at 7.7 per cent with an overall gross return of 27.7 per cent inclusive of capital gains. Although having rental yields of 4.7 per cent over the year, town houses had a negative overall return of -0.9 percent attributable to the negative capital gains over the period. Houses however had level returns with an overall yield score of 4.3 per cent.
With regard to offices, the median selling price for office space has declined by 10.3 per cent over the last 1 year due to the increased supply. With regard to office rentals, the median office rent went down by 2.5 per cent. For the same year, rental yield for office space was 9.9 per cent, higher than those of residential properties in the area. However, the overall yield was -0.5 per cent due to the decline in selling price of commercial properties.
