There is a particular kind of confidence that comes with completing payment on a property. Jackson Wandera Lutomia had earned that confidence. He had not rushed. He had not handed over a lump sum and crossed his fingers. He had paid his Ksh 9,500,000 in careful instalments over nearly three years, the way a man who respects his own money moves. First instalment in September 2015. Second in November. Third in February 2016. Fourth in June. Final payment in February 2018. Each cheque a small declaration that he was getting closer to the finish line. When he made that last payment, the developer executed a formal sale agreement with him, handed him possession of Unit 2 on the second floor of Capital View Apartments, and sent him on his way as a proud property owner. Jackson found a tenant. The tenant paid Ksh 55,000 every month, as tenants are supposed to do. Life was good. The investment had worked exactly as planned.
Then, in March 2020, Jackson went for a walk near the building and saw something that no property owner ever wants to see. An auction poster. Pinned near the entrance of the very building where his apartment was. He looked closer. His unit was on the list.
He did not take this well. Nobody would.
When he made enquiries, the full picture emerged and it was not pretty. In April 2016, while Jackson was still faithfully paying his instalments, Kings Pride Properties Limited had walked into Eco Bank Kenya Limited and taken a loan of Ksh 90,800,000. The security for that loan was the title to the land on which Capital View Apartments stood, which happened to be the same land on which Jackson’s apartment sat. The charge had been registered. The bank had its security. Jackson had his sale agreement that told him the unit was sold free of encumbrances, which was a statement that had been made in 2018 about a charge that had been registered in 2016. The developer had taken his instalments with one hand and pledged the land to a bank with the other, without telling him, without his consent, and without any visible sense that this was a problem.
Jackson went to court immediately and sought an injunction to stop the auction. The court considered the matter and declined to stop it. The auction proceeded in October 2022. In December 2022, Eco Bank took the property. Jackson’s tenant, who had been a perfectly reliable occupant paying rent into Jackson’s account every month, received instructions from Eco Bank’s agents to stop paying Jackson and start paying the bank instead. The tenant complied. Jackson watched his rental income, which had been flowing steadily for years, redirect itself to the institution that had just taken his apartment.
He had lost the apartment. He had lost the rental income. He had spent years in court. And the developer and the associated company, Kings Pride Properties Limited and Telagen Investments Limited, did not even show up to defend the case when it finally came before Justice Omollo in the Environment and Land Court in 2025. They filed no defence. They sent no witness. They offered no explanation. The case proceeded as an undefended suit, which in legal terms means Jackson presented his evidence, his documents, and his account of events to a court that had nothing on the other side to weigh it against. His letter of offer, his payment receipts, his sale agreement, his handover form, his tenant’s lease agreement, and the auction poster that had started the whole nightmare were all produced and none of it was contested.
The judgment that followed was thorough. Justice Omollo found that the defendants had breached the sale agreement by misrepresenting that the unit was free of encumbrances, by secretly charging the land to a bank without Jackson’s knowledge or consent, and by failing to transfer the title and grant him a lease after he had completed full payment of the purchase price. The court ordered Kings Pride Properties and Telagen Investments jointly and severally to refund the full purchase price of Ksh 9,500,000, to refund the Ksh 508,500 paid for stamp duty and legal fees, to pay Ksh 990,000 in lost rental income from May 2022 to October 2023, to pay an additional Ksh 960,000 in general damages covering continued rental losses through to March 2025, and to reimburse Ksh 502,750 in costs that had been awarded against Jackson in favour of Eco Bank during the earlier auction proceedings. The total liability crossed Ksh 12 million comfortably, plus interest and costs.
Jackson won. On paper, comprehensively. The judgment reads well. The numbers are clearly stated. The orders are unambiguous. The only small difficulty is that the company he won against has since been ordered into liquidation by a different court in May 2025, with an Official Liquidator appointed to go through whatever remains of its assets and distribute them among all its creditors. Jackson is one of those creditors. There are others. Whether there is enough left in the company to satisfy the judgments against it is a question that the liquidation process will answer slowly, and the answer is unlikely to be cheerful.
This case deserves to be read alongside the story of Amos Maina Mwago, who paid Ksh 2,250,000 to Kings Pride for a different apartment in a different project, sued them when that project was abandoned, and was told by the High Court in 2023 that he had sued the wrong company because Kings Pride was merely the marketing agent and the actual vendor was a separate entity entirely. And it deserves to be read alongside the story of Sammy Mugendi Njeru and Joseph Kiruga, who paid nearly Ksh 10 million towards apartments at Glenwood Apartments in Ruaka, never received sale agreements, never received apartments, never received refunds, and eventually petitioned the court to liquidate the company in December 2019. All three stories involve the same company. All three started in 2015. All three ended in court. And the company’s response, across all three, followed a remarkably consistent pattern of not delivering what was promised, not refunding what was taken, and not showing up when the consequences arrived.
The lesson that Jackson’s case specifically teaches is one that cannot be repeated often enough in Kenya’s property market. A sale agreement that tells you a property is free of encumbrances is only as reliable as the title search that verifies it. Before Jackson made his final payment in February 2018, a title search at the lands registry would have revealed the Eco Bank charge registered in April 2016. That search would have cost him a fraction of what he eventually lost. It would have shown him that the representation being made in the sale agreement he was about to sign did not match the reality recorded at the registry. He could have refused to complete payment until the charge was discharged. He could have walked away entirely. He could have done many things, none of which involved losing an apartment he had spent three years paying for.
Instead he signed, paid, found a tenant, enjoyed the rental income for a few years, and then went for a walk one morning in March 2020 and found an auction poster. The auction poster was not the beginning of his problem. It was just the moment he found out about it. The problem had been registered at the lands registry in April 2016, available for anyone who searched to find, sitting quietly in the public record while Jackson continued paying his instalments in good faith.
Search the title. Search it before the first payment. Search it before the last payment. Search it before you sign anything that tells you a property is free of encumbrances. The lands registry does not lie. Developers sometimes do.
