Review of the Proposed Amendments to the Sectional Properties Act 1987 and Proposed Shared Communities Act 2014
The Kenya Property Developers Association (KPDA) hosted their CEO Morning Learning Session on 7 July. The session included a presentation by KPDA on the affect of the Shared Communities Act of 2014 and the Sectional Properties Amendments of 2014.
KPDA‘s introduction to the document:
‘Registration of New Developments is currently undertaken utilizing the RTA (New Lands Act, 2012) using the sublease system. The Sectional Title Act of 1987 is hardly used by the public to register any new title. The Two Acts as currently set up, are cumbersome, difficult and extremely slow and are effective for registration of below 20 units. With the current legislation even with the computation that is ongoing it would still be impossible to register 1,000 units in less than 1 year. One of the biggest handicaps is that in the current legislation the Mother Title for the development remains as one pending file. Therefore any official search, valuations, registration etc., is very difficult when you have over 1,000 purchasers. Advocates, Banks and Valuers all trying to secure the one file for registration of their transaction. The New Legislation is designed to simplify the registration process and enable the Developers to create all individual titles of the units during the early stages of development. This will then enable efficient registration of the individual units as each will now have its own mother title. The “AMENDMENTS TO THE SECTIONAL ACT, 2014” are amendments designed to address these handicaps. The other main handicap is that there is no law at the moment that caters for large scale Multi Use Controlled projects. The current system involves subdivision of land, however, when land is subdivided currently by the developer, the other land owners, have no say in what the individual land owner wish to do with this land. And most individual land owners then go and get Council approval and develop whatever they wish, thereby devaluing the area. The effect is that you have uncontrolled developments and the neighborhood value goes down with time. Today buyers want to buy into a controlled development where they are assured that the overall environment will stay the same over the years and the neighbors are all actually involved in any changes to their environment. The new “SECTIONAL TITLES GATED COMMUNITIES ACT 2014” is designed to address this problem.’
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