Why DEMAR chose Stanmore Trust Kenya as escrow trustee

The trustee is appointed. Stanmore Trust Kenya Limited, a CMA-licensed escrow trustee, is now the named counterparty on every cheque that any buyer at The Dagaz will write before handover. This essay is the working note on why.

We opened the formal selection process in late March 2026 with three institutions on the working shortlist. The published criteria were narrow: a Capital Markets Authority licence to act as trustee, a documented track record of administering construction-linked escrow accounts on residential developments at our scale or larger, capital adequacy comfortably above the regulator's floor, and — the criterion that rarely makes the brochure — an operational team willing to be checked on detail.

Two of the three institutions met the licensing threshold. One met all four. Stanmore Trust Kenya Limited.

What does Stanmore actually do for a buyer at The Dagaz? It receives the money. Every reservation cheque, every staged payment, every progress instalment is paid by the buyer directly to a designated trust account at Stanmore. DEMAR Properties Limited never touches it. Funds are released only against milestone certificates issued by an independent project monitor, against the construction programme that was filed with the trust deed at the time of buyer signature. The release schedule is fixed, published, and shared with every reservation pack.

The structural protection is in the words "directly" and "designated". Directly, because no money travels through DEMAR's operating accounts on its way to the trustee — there is no intermediate stop where a cheque could be misrouted, comingled, or otherwise drift out of its purpose. Designated, because the trust account exists for The Dagaz alone; the funds in it are not part of DEMAR's balance sheet, are not available to DEMAR's general creditors, and would not be reachable in the event that DEMAR itself were to fail.

Erik Søndergaard, our founder and managing director, signed the trust deed countersignature in the second week of April. The legal counterparty on our side is Otieno & Patel Advocates LLP, who handle the SPV layer and the buyer-facing contract suite. The audit counterparty is Bowman Adair Kenya, who reviews the trust account quarterly and whose findings are filed against the project record. The project monitor — the third leg of the triangle, the firm that issues the milestone certificates against which Stanmore actually releases funds — is in final engagement and will be named on countersignature.

We were asked, in the working sessions before signature, why we did not pick the cheapest option. The cheapest option was a smaller trust company whose operational team was willing to take the work but had not done residential construction escrow at our scale before. The price difference would have been roughly thirty basis points on the trustee fee. We took the more expensive trustee because a thirty-basis-point saving paid for by a counterparty who is learning their first construction escrow account on our buyers is not a saving. It is a risk transfer to the people we are asking to trust us.

The buyer's cheque now passes through Stanmore. The trustee watches the buyer's money. The auditor watches the trustee. The buyer reads the audit. None of this is exotic. It is the standard. We mention it because, on too many Nairobi developments, the standard is the part that gets dropped.

The licence number, the trust deed reference, and the standing instructions are filed on the project Standards page.