Having long been perceived as a region unworthy of state and private sector investment, over the last decade northern Kenya has been reimagined as a new frontier for economic growth. This reimagining has been majorly facilitated by a number of mega-projects orientated around the tapping of natural resources, including the ambitious and pervasive Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport corridor (LAPSSET). While many, and not least northerners themselves, are speculating about the futures new state and private sector investments will bring, this paper argues that these speculations themselves remake places that lie in the vicinity of anticipated development. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in and around Isiolo town, itself a key node in LAPSSET, it focuses on what I term ‘propertying’ – various practices of claiming exclusive ownership of land – on the town’s own frontier. In doing so, it shows that ordinary people’s anticipatory actions produce new sites of value and investment. Many of those who are propertying at the edges of Isiolo are the very people who are the most vulnerable to displacement as land values rise. Propertying pastoral land not only anticipates value but also exclusion, and seeks to ensure a stake in the city of the future.