Buying land in Kenya: what to check before you pay

This note is for due diligence. It is not legal advice. Conveyancing belongs with an advocate. Survey and spatial due diligence belong with a licensed surveyor. The statutes named are Kenyan written law as currently published; always check the current text and your own facts.

People buy land from a title, a seller’s sketch, and a walk around the plot. That is not enough. Kenyan law splits rights from place, and then asks a third question about use. The register says who holds what interest. The cadastral map and a proper survey say where that interest sits on the ground. Planning permission says what you may do with it. Mixing the three is how money is lost.

The title is not the ground

Under the Land Registration Act, 2012, each registration unit keeps a land registry with a land register and a cadastral map (sections 7 and 15). The office responsible for survey prepares and maintains that cadastral map. In practice you will often meet it as a Registry Index Map. The title or search tells you about the registered proprietor and the entries that bind the parcel. The cadastral map is the official spatial record: shape, parcel number, relation to neighbours.

They work together. They are not the same document. A title number without the map, or a map without a current search, is half a picture.

The Land Registration (General) Regulations, 2017 make that split concrete. The property section of the register records the parcel identifiers, the approximate area, the user, the cadastral sheet number, and — only where boundaries have been fixed — a cadastral plan number. An official search is applied for in the prescribed form and answered by a certificate of official search. The search is the advocate’s first tool. It is not a survey.

Section 18 of the Act is the sentence most buyers never hear. Unless it is noted in the register that the boundaries have been fixed, the cadastral map and any filed plan are deemed to indicate only the approximate boundaries and the approximate situation of the parcel. A deed plan or RIM extract is not, by itself, a guarantee that the fence you were shown is the legal line.

The process that turns an approximate line into a fixed one is section 19: the Registrar, after notice to adjoining owners and occupiers, causes the precise position to be defined by survey, files a plan, and notes the register. Section 20 is different. It requires the proprietor to keep the fences, hedges, stones, pillars, beacons, walls and other features that demarcate the boundary in good order. Do not confuse a well-kept fence with a fixed boundary. One is maintenance. The other is a note on the register after survey.

Where all the boundaries have been defined under section 19(3), the Act says an uncertain line is determined as stipulated in the Survey Act (Cap. 299).

What the Survey Act and Survey Regulations are for

Cadastral survey for registration is not a casual measurement. The Survey Act puts licensed surveyors, the Land Surveyors Board, and the Director of Surveys in charge of the system that feeds title. A licensed surveyor is responsible for the correctness of every survey carried out by that surveyor or under that surveyor’s supervision. Trigonometrical stations, fundamental benchmarks and boundary beacons that define a holding are to be shown on the plan attached to, or referred to in, instruments that deal with that land. And no land is deemed to have been surveyed or resurveyed until the plan has been authenticated by the Director of Surveys, an authorised Government surveyor, or the seal of the Survey of Kenya.

The Survey Regulations (Legal Notice 168 of 1994, as revised) set how marks are placed and how control is held. An approved assistant may help in the field only with Board approval, under the licensed surveyor’s direct personal control. The surveyor remains fully responsible. That is why “a friend with a GPS” or a drone fly-over is not authentic cadastral due diligence. The licence is not a badge. It is how the survey stays inside the system the register relies on.

The Land Act sits beside the register

The Land Act, 2012, and the regulations made under it, are the administration statute: how public and private land are managed, and how dealings — transfers, leases, charges — are created and completed. Registration of the transferee is what completes a transfer. A clean-looking title can still sit under a charge. If you take a transfer subject to a charge, the Act implies an agreement that you will pay the interest secured by that charge. Controlled land (certain border and coastal strips) cannot be dealt with to an ineligible person without the Cabinet Secretary’s prior written approval.

Cautions, restrictions and inhibitions live on the register under the Land Registration Act. The Land Act tells you how the dealing itself is supposed to work. The search is how you see the burden. The surveyor’s first question is still whether the parcel you were shown is the parcel in that search.

Rational thought: if the papers and the ground tell different stories, do not pay to “sort it later.” Sort it first. If the land is agricultural, your advocate will also ask about consent under the Land Control Act — a separate written-law question from the title and the map.

What the register does not show — overriding interests

A registered proprietor holds subject to what is on the register, and also subject to interests that need not be noted. The Land Registration Act (section 25, read with section 28) is express: indefeasibility is not a magic wand. Overriding interests include trusts including customary trusts; certain rights of way, water and profits; natural rights of light, air, water and support; compulsory acquisition and similar statutory powers; unpaid rates that another written law makes a charge; rights being acquired by limitation or prescription; and electric, telephone, pipeline and similar service lines, among others.

Common law and ordinary sense agree: occupation is evidence. Someone living on the land, a path that has been used for years, a spouse’s interest, a neighbour’s cultivation over the beacon line — these are not “not your problem” because the title is in one name. Caveat emptor still has work to do. An advocate reads the register and the family facts. A surveyor reads the ground against the cadastral record. You need both.

Planning is a third question: PLUPA

The Physical and Land Use Planning Act, 2019 is not a title statute. It is the development-control statute. Section 57: a person shall not carry out development within a county without development permission from the county executive committee member. Section 58: you apply, with the documents, plans and particulars the county requires, and you state the proposed use. Section 59: those plans and documents are to be prepared by the relevant qualified, registered and licensed professionals. Subdivision, amalgamation, change of user, extension of user and building works sit in that system.

The Physical and Land Use Planning (General Development Permission and Control) Regulations, 2021 (Legal Notice 253) spell out change of user and extension of user, the supporting plans, and public notification where the Act requires it. Buying “residential” land to put up flats, or agricultural land to build a house, is not finished when the title transfers. The user recorded in the property section and the county’s plan may not match what you intend. Permission is a separate legal act from transfer. Starting work without it is an offence under section 57, and the county can require restoration of the land.

A surveyor does not grant planning permission. A surveyor can tell you whether the land you are buying is the land you think it is, and can support the location and scheme plans later applications will need. The planner and the county do the rest.

A rational checklist before money moves

1. Instruct an advocate. Official search of the register: proprietor, approximate area, user, charges, cautions, restrictions, inhibitions, pending applications.
2. Get the cadastral picture — cadastral map / RIM extract and any filed or cadastral plan — and compare it to the parcel number and sheet on the search. Ask whether a cadastral plan number appears (that is the register’s hint that boundaries may have been fixed).
3. Go to the land. Who occupies it? What do the neighbours say is the line? Are beacons visible? Photograph what you find.
4. If the boundaries are only approximate, do not treat the fence as proved. Section 20 says keep the marks; it does not make the fence the legal line.
5. Ask what you intend to do with the land. If you will build or subdivide, start the PLUPA question early.
6. If the paper and the ground diverge, stop. That is a Land Check and, if needed, a field survey under the Survey Act — not a price negotiation.

What a Land Check is — and is not

A Land Check is authentic survey due diligence: records, cadastral map, a first spatial look, and an honest statement of what is clear and what needs the field. It does not transfer land. It does not replace an advocate. It does not invent a fixed boundary where the register has not fixed one. It does not grant development permission.

If you are buying land in Kenya and you want that done before you spend, start there.

Related: where is the boundary? · can I subdivide this land? · what a topographic survey gives your architect · when you actually need a surveyor in Thika.