After job-hunting for four years, George, a university graduate, finally landed a plum job with a leading audit firm in Nairobi in 2009.

With a good salary, he soon felt it was time to move out of his brother’s house — where he had lived for the years he was jobless — and rent one for himself.

And so his search for a house started. Every morning, he would religiously leaf through the day’s newspapers to see which houses were on offer, their prices, and location.

Then one morning early last year, he saw an advert in a local daily for a two-bedroom house in Kilimani going for a monthly rent of Sh25,000 (the market rate for such a house in the same locality is Sh50,000-Sh60,000).

For several weeks now, a giant billboard erected by Fidelity Bank at the Nairobi railway station intersection has been attracting the attention of thousands of people who use the busy Uhuru Highway each day, announcing easy loans for construction.

Today, such commercial bank offers targeting salaried workers are commonplace and have been credited with extending Nairobi’s real estate boom to the city’s satellite towns.

Mr Andrew Mutwiri, who nurses a childhood ambition to amass wealth in real estate says such offers were almost unthinkable six years ago, forcing him to make what he calls “the bet of lifetime” to realise his dream.

Once A client has identified a particular property to buy the first thing they should be is hire a real estate lawyer. The lawyer should then facilitate a title search to ascertain the ownership of the property.

Once the ownership has been ascertained and the lawyer is sure the property does not have any restrictions and the price of the property has been agreed between the seller and the buyer, the lawyer should then prepare a sale agreement which is a conditional preliminary contract.

Upon execution (signing) the buyer then pays a deposit of 10% to 30% of the purchase price. This deposit is refundable if the seller defaults on the transaction.