The Image of AFRICA has been DISTORTED around the WORLD & We are CHANGING the NARRATIVES via YOUTUBE videos One Country At Time. Until the HISTORY of AFRICA is told by AFRICANS, the story of GREATNESS will always GLORIFY the IMPERIALISTS!. We are in Kenya & In this Episode, we feature Leah Wambui who quits her alcoholic wine business to start-up real estate!
For many people, failure to scale up the education ladder is a matter that has the potential to detrimentally weigh down on their lives.
However, Leah Wambui seems to have turned the pain of missing out on university education due to financial constraints into establishing herself in the real estate venture.
She is the current CEO of Cheriez Properties Limited located in Kitengela. The firm boasts 200 houses each valued at ksh17 million.
When she was 16, she lost her mother and this forced her to stay with her aunt. She helped her in managing her shop, especially during the holidays.
She learned work, patience, and mentorship from her maternal aunt who was successfully operating a business in Mombasa.
“Even when I was a little girl, I always wanted to be like her. I admired that she would travel the world and she looked nice and had nice things,” Wambui told a popular YouTube channel.
At one point, she thought of starting a wines and spirits business and reached out for financial help from her aunt.
“I talked to my auntie, I said I wanted to start something like what she was doing. I wanted to start out in Nairobi but the amount of money that she could get was only enough to start out in Kiambu,” says Wambui.
Her business was successful and she even managed to save part of the profits in table banking groups popularly known as chamas. Her burning ambition to grow forced her to borrow a car in a move to spread the business tentacles to nearby towns and maximize profits.
In 2009, she bought 8 acres of land in Kitengela after selling their house, shares and topping up the money with savings. Wambui’s newly found ambition was to invest in real estate.
At the start, she sank a borehole and constructed the boundary wall. By the end of 2015, she had set up 10 houses and planned to sell each at 17 million.
However, what was an ambitious project turned to be more stressful as potential buyers would visit the site, ask her countless questions then shrug off her offers.
“We had our first show house and we invited people to come. I thought that the moment we had the show house we would get clients. I got into a rude shock. People came – and the questions that followed; are you an architect? Are you an interior designer? How many projects have you done?” she recalls.
She resorted to marketing the houses internationally, but she still couldn’t get the first buyer until the end of 2016 when two customers came in. Wambui, a deeply religious woman owes success to her prayerful tendency.
