Frank Ireri, the former boss of Housing Finance (HF), has passed away in Nairobi at 63 after battling cancer. For over a decade, Ireri was the confident, sharp face of Kenya’s mortgage sector, defined by a massive gamble: turning an old, niche lender into a diversified financial powerhouse.
When Ireri took the reins at Housing Finance in 2006, he wasn’t interested in maintaining the status quo. He wanted to build a financial behemoth.
The guy was a serious technocrat, a Certified Public Accountant with banking experience from giants like Citibank and Barclays. He took that corporate DNA and injected it into HF. His big play was diversifying the loan book and launching new business arms. This culminated in the creation of the HF Group holding structure in 2014, allowing the company to aggressively push into retail banking and corporate bonds.
For a good while, the plan clicked. HF was suddenly an ambitious player on the block. Ireri wasn’t just chasing profits; he genuinely believed banks had a duty to help Kenyans achieve homeownership.
But the latter years were brutal. After 2014, the challenges piled up. By 2017, HF’s profits had cratered, dropping from around Ksh. 904 million to just Ksh. 125 million. The perfect storm of a property market cool-down and the government’s interest rate cap completely squeezed the margins.
Then came the really awkward stuff.
The public got wind of his Ksh. 64 million annual pay, which amounted to nearly half the company’s total profit that year. It was a terrible look. The final straw: court documents later surfaced, alleging billions of shillings in bad loans had gone underreported during his tenure. He denied any wrongdoing, but the damage was done.
In 2018, after 13 years, Ireri simply walked away. No fanfare, no big send-off—just a quiet exit that spoke volumes about his tough final years.
Even after leaving the corporate chaos, Ireri stuck to his core conviction. He went on to chair the board of Habitat for Humanity Kenya and served as a director at Centum Real Estate, always pushing the agenda for affordable housing.
Frank Ireri’s legacy is complicated. He was a visionary who modernized an institution, but his name will forever be linked to the financial turmoil and reputational scars of his final years. One thing is clear, though: he never stopped fighting for the simple, powerful idea that every Kenyan should have a place to call home.