The Prospects and Challenges of Meeting Housing Needs: The Case of Ghana’s Real Estate Sector.

Abstract

Research by scholars and experiences gathered by practitioners have established that real estate development requires multiple processes that are often risky, lengthy and complicated. This is because there exist a lot of obstacles in real estate development. In spite of the seemingly obstacles in the real estate sector, real estate development projects also present lucrative investment opportunities for estate developers. In the Ghanaian context, real estate development is bedeviled with a lot of challenges ranging from high cost of housing, lack of state funding, inadequate access to credit, high competition from foreign firms, higher taxes, and poor housing data among others. Against this backdrop, this study found it imperative to critically examine the prospects, challenges faced by real estate companies in Ghana and the best means of mitigating those challenges. The study found that Value for money, Litigation free, the option to choose different locations and different structures that meet the specification of the buyer are the main reasons for the progress of real estate firms in Ghana. It was observed that majority of the respondents perceive services rendered by real estate firms in Ghana are more expensive than those sold by the individuals and unregistered firms. In mitigating the challenges confronting the real estate industry, respondents of the study consider it expedient that the government intervenes to cushion the local real estate firms financially by providing with some tax cuts so as to be able to compete with their foreign counterparts.