Everyone is a member of a housing estate in Nairobi, from Spring Valley to Kibera and other neighbourhoods above and beyond. They all have to deal with things like security, service charges and garbage collection, to others like painting common areas, noise & smoke disturbances and shared parking spaces.

How do residents manage? Often it takes a few keen dedicated people, usually long-term residents in the area, who volunteer their time to marshal and organize the other residents who are largely passengers. They spend a lot of time organizing and resolving matters and chasing and collecting monthly payments from their fellow residents.

What tools can they use to help in these time-consuming and unwelcome but necessary tasks? I put up a query on Twitter and these are the top ones shared back, in no particular order.

• Verus Africa: Their platform is the only one that is cloud-based and caters for residential as well as commercial real estate management. (Ok. They are also my relatives😂).
• Try Smartkodi (how it works video here) .. SmartKodi is an all-in-one property management software that does everything from lease management, automated rent invoicing and receipting, utilities tracking and management, a comprehensive accounting system and so much more! Talk to us.
• We built Gated specifically for estate management.
• @kodipoint at @tenzilabs we are piloting a similar product.
• Check out RentPay.
• Nyumbani – talk to us.
• Sapama.
• Check out Safaricom bill manager.
• Check out Kodisher by @mwangisk (who) can give more details about it.
• KCB Group have a property management portal as well.