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Why listing online is not enough to run a profitable short-term rental
Living room area at Lavington Residences managed by Trianum Hospitality in Nairobi on August 18, 2025.
Running a hotel or a serviced apartment profitably for an extended period of time can be a tall order for many property owners or managers, in an environment where customers often prefer to go for what is new.
However, having maintained occupancy rates of 80 percent in properties they have managed for 15 years, three sisters, Samantha, Mwende and Mutheu Muna, have seemingly managed to crack the code of customer retention.
In 2010, the sisters founded Trianum Hospitality, a property management firm that began by targeting local apartment owners before scaling to partner with international brands such as Best Western.
DN2 Property sat down with one of the sisters, Samantha, as well as the company’s CEO Liza Uku, to uncover what it takes to run a profitable hospitality real estate enterprise in a highly competitive environment.
With the advent of online booking platforms such as Airbnb, property owners can now transact with clients without the need for much third-party human interaction. Why is it still important for property owners to hire the services of professional property managers? (Samantha)
A lot of people who have extra cash look to the hospitality real estate industry as a place where they can get an easy return on investment. Because they assume that running hospitality operations is easy, they end up losing money or find that their properties are not performing as well as they had anticipated.
You may have heard many people in the market complain that hospitality is not a good investment, but the issue here is that they may not have understood how the business works.
To operationalise serviced apartments or short-term rentals successfully, you need a number of things, including computers, a front office team, sometimes chefs and many other staff to make the guest’s stay comfortable. Understanding core management is what makes your property successful; without understanding the different aspects that make the business run, you will always face challenges.
Welcoming guests
It is not simply about welcoming guests and giving them rooms to sleep in. There is also the aspect of what equipment do you need in the room? What services does the guest need to have from the time they enter your gate to the time they exit? What operational systems do you need to have in place to ensure that the check-in is smooth? What other operational management systems do you need to have in place to ensure that financial matters are in order?
Trianum Hospitality Managing Director Samantha Muna (left) with Trianum Hospitality CEO Liza Uku at one of their properties in Lavington, Nairobi on August 18, 2025.
Very important to the execution and successful management of a property is the team that you put in place. Sometimes, you may need to invest in cost controllers, procurement officers and ICT teams to make sure that everything is running smoothly. Many invest in how the property looks; they want to have the fancy lights, the beautiful chairs when you come in, but they don’t invest in the right service team.
You must have people with the right experience, attitude and understanding of what is expected of them to make sure that the customer service aspect is happening, that the operational efficiency is happening as well. You also have to take into consideration the marketing aspect of your business. So you have built or bought this property, but that does not necessarily mean that customers are going to come from the get-go. You have to get the word out that you are open for business, you have to understand what platform you will be on from an online perspective, and which market segments you should reach, depending on the type of property you have. In addition, what social media platforms are you going to advertise on, what is the messaging going to be, and what is the brand going to say?
In terms of yields or return on investment, what is the value proposition for hiring a professional property manager? (Samantha)
Compare an apartment hotel and an apartment block. With an apartment, you are doing regular residential, you put your listing out there, somebody rents, and they remain responsible for how they use the space internally. The utilities, the power, and the internet are up to the tenant. You as the property owner, are just concerned about the physical maintenance of the property.
With an apartment hotel, you would be going for a smaller and more targeted market. These are people who have come to stay for a certain period of time. It could be short, two or three days or it could be longer, a year or more, because they have been seconded to work maybe at the UN or have a long-term project that they are doing. That person needs all the amenities and services to be in place because they are not necessarily familiar with how Nairobi works, so they want fully furnished apartments with utilities in place.
Safety and security
They also want safety and security. They want to be assured that when they come in at night or leave in the morning, their items will be safe. They are new to a city, so they also want someone who can give them information on the best places to buy what they need, or someone who can help them get a taxi to go where they need to be. If we are to use Nairobi as a case study, regular residential may seem like the best investment option, because you are looking at a bigger market of close to five million inhabitants, and the hustle of maintenance is reduced.
You can also rent out your units as soon as they are complete and start to recoup your investment, but then you have to contend with lower rental yields of between five to seven percent, because this market segment is saturated. If you opt to take the serviced apartment route, it would take a bit longer to recoup your investment because this is a niche market and you have to advertise well, but over an extended period of time, you could earn good rental yields of up to nine percent.
Changes to the Sectional Properties Act now allow for the individual ownership of a unit within a multi-unit development, like an apartment or flat. How can property management firms manage the expectations of different owners in multi-unit developments, whilst ensuring their clients remain competitive in the rapidly evolving hospitality industry? (Liza)
Due to a rapid increase in demand over the last five years, a lot of real estate companies are now selling their apartments to people who want to venture into the serviced apartment space. As a result, instead of having a building with one owner, we are now having a building with multiple apartment owners.
Some apartments have owners who stay there, others want to rent them out as regular rentals, whereas others want to get into the short-term rental business. If all these owners were to come in with their different property managers, things could be chaotic because all these managers have their different ways of working. That is why convergence is crucial.
Now, for that single property manager to meet the expectations of all these different owners well, they have to demonstrate patience and open communication.
Kitchen area at Lavington Residences managed by Trianum Hospitality in Lavington, Nairobi on August 18, 2025.
As much as you are an expert, you have to listen to what your client is saying and adjust yourself accordingly, to meet some of their expectations. You can then demonstrate your expertise by helping them understand why investing in a certain aspect would be important.
Globally, property owners and managers are taking into account Environmental, Social and Governance standards to make their properties more marketable and minimise risk. What is the place of ESG in Kenya’s hospitality real estate market? (Samantha)
To remain sustainable, ESG must be at the heart of what property owners and managers in this industry do. It could be something as simple as eliminating the use of single-use plastics, such as the small shampoo bottles that guests may love to take away as a keepsake, but that clutter our oceans and dumpsites. We, for instance, have moved away from that in the properties we manage, and are putting in refillable items on the wall.
Concrete jungle
Greening the environment around is equally crucial because no one wants to live in a fully concrete jungle. Something as simple as having a patch of grass with some trees could do. On the social aspect, we know that there are a lot of women who work in hospitality, but at the senior level, you find that the industry is still male dominated.
Straight out of school, organisations can identify young, talented receptionists or sales managers who come to work for them and train them on finance, human resource and operations, so that they can later occupy positions of leadership. Women and youth groups can also be given contracts to supply items such as furniture, or provide digital and social media services, so that they can also grow their brands.
Which are some of the common challenges potential property managers are likely to encounter upon venturing into this industry? (Liza)
A lot of people want to be involved in the hospitality business but they may not understand how it works. Bringing them to understand why they need to invest in certain things can be a challenge. In addition, the cost of operations has significantly risen over the last five years, therefore, trying to find the balance of maintaining initial price offerings while still managing costs can be a challenge.
Getting the right team in place and keeping that team motivated in order to maintain it, can also be a challenge. The hospitality industry does suffer from very high levels of employee turnover, and is constantly experiencing changes. Trying to keep up with the change, even just the change in technology, is also not easy.
Are there any policy gaps that need to be addressed to spur the growth of the country’s hospitality industry, particularly in the area of property management? (Samantha)
Bathroom area at Lavington Residences managed by Trianum Hospitality in Lavington, Nairobi on August 18, 2025.
From a policy perspective, regular residential does not attract Value-Added-Tax (VAT), but hotel apartments do attract VAT. Of course, we do not want double taxation; we pay VAT, and on the other side, the owner is paying the rental income tax. Clarifying some of these areas can help in attracting investors.
The other issue from a policy perspective is on training - 30 years ago, when I went to college, hospitality wasn’t a mainstream career; now, every university offers hospitality as a degree, diploma or certificate. How do we get all these guys on the same level so that we are then able to offer the same level of service and avoid watering down our image as a country?
If you go to the Middle East, you find a lot of Kenyans working in the hospitality industry, how do we make sure that the qualifications they go with, is a reflection of the country’s good image? The other gap is diversification. For a long time, when you think of tourism in Kenya, you think of beaches in Mombasa or game parks.
How can we tap into the conferencing segment that is growing in Nairobi, or sports tourism, so that we are not only reliant on the traditional beach and safari? Why not have a situation where we host a major business conference at a time such as this when the CHAN championship is going on, so that attendees can also buy tickets to go watch football matches? This would really help the accommodation providers.
What trends or opportunities do you foresee emerging in the country’s hospitality real estate segment, and how can property owners and managers position themselves to benefit from these new developments? (Liza)
We are seeing a lot of people, especially from countries such as America, relocating to Africa. We must make sure that we are seen as a place they can start off with.
Leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence to make booking processes seamless, networking, and visiting new places to learn about the latest trends can help stakeholders capitalise on this emerging opportunity.
We are also noticing a lot of people travelling to Kenya for medical reasons. Many people from Uganda, for instance, are coming to Kenya to give birth. You want to give them a comfortable place to stay before they go back home. We, for instance, are working with insurance companies to make sure that this experience is seamless for patients and their families.
