Counties boosting landscaping business

A section of the newly established Machakos People's Park. (Photo:Standard)

Many landscapers and interior designers are opening satellite offices in small county towns to cash in on the growth of the middle-class, writes NICK OLUOCH

Talk of interior design or landscaping and what comes to mind is home life in major towns like Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Nakuru.

Up to about a year ago, it was virtually impossible to get even a landscaping business going on outside these towns; smaller towns were deemed “too small” for such businesses. Getting even one landscaper would be a miracle.

However, with the opening up of these small towns, courtesy of devolution, landscapers are giving the towns a second look. Today, a number of landscapers are opening up satellite offices across counties as they position themselves to capture the fast growing real estate market, after county governments made these towns their headquarters.

From Kakamega to Homa Bay, Kisii to Kericho and Makueni, landscapers have been busy marketing their services as they seek to do business with the growing middle-class created by the county governments.

According to Timothy Karani, a Nairobi-based landscaper with satellite branches in Nakuru and Migori counties, although it is still not profitable to open a fully functional office within the counties, the increasing number of clients looking for landscaping professionals within the counties mean that they can no longer be ignored.

“The need for landscaping services within the county headquarters is growing fast,” he says.

He says he first went to Migori to carry out landscaping for a client whom he had worked with in another project in Nairobi and who was putting up a home in Migori.

“When I was through, another client, who was impressed with my work, gave me another contract,” he says, adding that this saw him get another four contracts in the area, leading to him opening a small office.

Today, Timo’s Landscapers has got an agency which look for new clients, help them in signing contracts before contacting the Nairobi office, which then sends personnel to the ground to carry out the work.

Contracts

He says at the moment, he gets two to three contracts a month within Migori county, a figure he says while is still quite low, will hopefully continue rising as more structures continue coming up.

And he is not alone. In Kisumu, Jim Onyango, a contractor with Jida Construction Company, says they had to diversify and get into the landscaping business after they failed to get a qualified landscaper to work on a housing project they had put up in the lakeside town.

During this period, he realised that lack of qualified landscapers was a common problem in the region as he met a number of other homeowners who were also looking for landscapers.

“Most of the people we were referred to had learnt the job just through observation without undergoing any formal training,” he says, adding that this made him doubt the quality of their work.

After looking around for sometime, they eventually met a young man who had trained as a landscaper but was still looking for employment and decided to employ him. Since then, he says, the department of landscaping within their company has grown with five full-time employees. They have so far managed to get clients in Kisii, Homa Bay, Kakamega and Eldoret.

He says most of the clients they get are through referrals by those they had worked for before and were happy with their work.

However, they also market through word of mouth whenever they come across new constructions coming up, letting the owners know what they do.

Onyango says they are yet to open offices in other towns. They, however, have people on the ground who look for such jobs for them on commission basis.

“We are seriously thinking about opening offices in Kakamega and Eldoret,” he says.

It is not just the landscaping sector, which is booming in the counties. Interior design business is also fast picking up as new homeowners look for professionals to design their homes.

And according to Karani, so far, his company has linked more than ten people from Migori and Nakuru with interior designers from Nairobi.

However, he says landscaping as a business faces a number of challenges as it seeks to expand into the counties, which is a new ground.

“Pricing is a challenge, especially for first time clients,” he says, adding that most clients simply do not understand why someone could charge “so much” to do landscaping.

This, he says, has been made even worse by the presence of many untrained landscapers who he says are ready to take any amount of money for the sub-standard service they offer, making the prices quoted by the professionals look too high.

Closely related to this, he says, is lack of understanding about just what is the role of the landscaper, especially in the smaller towns, with a number of clients assuming landscaping is all about levelling the soil within the compound.

Levies

He says another factor hindering the growth of this business is the introduction of a number of levies on businesses by county governments.

“Many county governments believe landscapers get a lot of money hence highly tax them,” he says, adding that this has scared landscapers from opening offices in county headquarters, instead preferring to use agencies.

Karani concurs, saying some counties require landscapers to pay up to Sh10,000 per year before they are allowed to operate offices in the counties. He says while this is not a lot of money for established landscapers, it is unfair for young firms.

“Let the counties allow businesses to grow before demanding such hefty charges,” he says.

“Once the businesses pick up, we will not only be able to pay the charges, but also act as a source of employment for tens of youths within the counties.”