Nine Kenyan strategies, year-by-year cashflow, IRR, payback, county liquidity, and the reality-check that stops “20M = 30 apartments” before you act on it. Free, no signup.
Data current as of 18 May 2026 · refreshed monthly
Drives the liquidity / soko score on each strategy.
Median KE-market assumptions.
Sorted by total cashflow at year 5 in the base scenario. Every number ties to an editable assumption — open a card to see them.
Buy lean steers, finish them in 90-day cycles, sell at market weight. Fast cash rotation.
~447 head at KES 38,000/lean steer (working capital 85%).
Build a small block of rentable units. Monthly rent + capital appreciation on exit.
18 doors at KES 1,100,000 build cost per 2BR unit.
CBK-issued infra bond. Tax-free semi-annual coupon, principal back at maturity.
Cytonn / Sanlam / Madison MMF. Daily liquidity, monthly compound, no effort.
Equal-weight basket of 8-12 NSE blue-chips. Dividend + capital appreciation.
Buy and hold raw land. No income; pure capital appreciation at exit.
On 17 May 2026 a Kenyan investor pitched on X: "KSh 20M in 30 apartments earning KSh 12K monthly may generate ~KSh 3M yearly in stable passive income. The same capital in 3 livestock fattening cycles can generate ~KSh 10M+ annually." The reply that mattered most: "20 million cannot build a block of 30 apartments stop smoking." That reply was right — KSh 20M typically builds 12–20 doors at realistic Kenyan build costs, not 30. The whole debate (35K views, 636 likes, ongoing) hinges on numbers that are easy to get wrong and easy to fact-check, and there was no tool doing either. This is that tool. Every assumption is documented, every range is sourced, every input is reality-checked.
Most online pitches quote annualised yield headlines — "15% rental", "30% land", "200% per cattle cycle". This tool models year-by-year cashflow including the costs that get cut from the pitch: build cost per door, occupancy, vacancy, opex, mortality, transaction cost, manager-handover risk. The pitch numbers are real for the year they happened — they are not realistic as a multi-year base case. The reality-check layer surfaces the gap.
Each input has a published Kenyan-market range. Build cost per 2BR door, for example, has a soft range of KSh 800K–1.5M (KPDA + active Nairobi developers) and a hard range of KSh 400K–4M. Type anything outside the hard range and we reject it. Type inside the hard range but outside the soft range and we flag it with the benchmark next to your number. That stops "20M = 30 apartments" from making it past the input form.
Because Kenyan MMFs returned 12–14% net in 2025 and a real estate net rental yield + appreciation under base assumptions runs 9–13% all-in. On pure cumulative cashflow at horizon end, MMF wins more often than real-estate believers expect — particularly over 3–5 year windows. Real estate wins decisively when capital appreciation runs hot, which it does in cycles, not monotonically. We let you switch to aggressive assumptions to see when the equation flips.
Brian Kimeli's "where will you sell them?" — quantified. Each strategy has a county-by-county score 0–100 that approximates how fast you can exit at fair value. Nairobi apartments: 90. Garissa apartments: 25. Livestock in Kajiado: 80 (active markets). Livestock in Nairobi-county: 35 (you are the buyer, not the seller). Cash-equivalent strategies (MMF, bonds, SACCO) are 100 everywhere — exit is a redemption request.
Most inputs are net of tax where the tax falls on the cashflow line: SACCO interest is net of 15% WHT, dividends net of 5%, rental income net of the 7.5% monthly residential rental tax. Infra bonds are tax-free at source. Capital gains tax (15%) is not modeled at exit yet — bake it into your exit-value expectations if you are using a 5+ year horizon on real estate. We will add a CGT toggle in a future update.
Not yet — the current build is stateless. The Debate Mode link prefills the strategy choice and inputs, so you can copy that URL to share. Saved scenarios + cloud sync land with BP-V3 (planned).
Each strategy card links to the relevant directory page on paybillke for actual numbers and providers: SACCOs (top-10 SACCOs guide), MMFs (best MMF Kenya guide), infrastructure bonds (CBK auction guide), apartments (asset finance guide), and so on. The calculator tells you which strategy to look at — the directory pages tell you how to actually buy in.
Open any strategy above to see the sensitivity levers, the county liquidity overlay, and the assumptions behind the number, so you can argue with it rather than take it on trust.