The Ghana Real Estate Professionals Association remains consistent to mobilize capital and resources to support continuous research and educational programs for the real estate industry in Ghana.

Over the years GREPA has partnered with accredited educational institutions and global partners to deliver research and educational solutions for Ghana's real estate industry since 2013 through the Africa Center for Real Estate, also called the ACRE Project and most recently the Ghana Real Estate Educational Series(GREES); These projects were born out of the ‘’Ghana Scorecard’’ recommendations by the International Property Market Scorecard project which summarizes that a critical, but missing component in the evolution of the industry has been the wide-spread education of professionals in the real estate industry.

Without knowledge-transfer to industry professionals and subsequently to their clients, there can be only limited improvement to market functionality, regardless of the volume of aid investment or degree of improvement to policies, processes, or data collection.

Earlier this year GREPA launched a Multiple Listing Service platform powered by XPOSURE with a consumer facing side dubbed LoopGhana https://listings.loopghana.com/.

With increased capital flow and globalization of Africa’s real estate markets, general data remains limited. There has been limited or no transaction data reported, valuation standards, data integrity, and transparency issues in these emerging markets in Africa.

According to the JLL 2018 Global real estate transparency index report for sub-Saharan Africa, although transparency continues to improve gradually, the advances are at a muted pace than in previous years and further improvement will be essential to support the drive for greater efficiency and increased investment into real estate and infrastructure.

Ghana’s MLS is the first in Africa and will be one of the systems needed to solve the transparency, valuation standards, and data integrity issues to improve efficiency and increased investment in Ghana and beyond.

Aside the above economic benefits of the MLS, the XPOSURE MLS is a tool that:

• Helps listing brokers find other cooperative brokers working with buyers to help sell or lease properties. Without this collaborative incentive of systems like the LoopGhana MLS, brokers would create their own separate fragmented systems rather than consolidating property information.
• Serves as a contractual offer of compensation to brokers who cooperate in selling other brokers’ listings.

This GREPA’s initiative goes to complement the on-going evolution of global real estate markets and keeping Ghana’s industry at par with modern trends and dynamics by providing educational support to industry professionals and students with a quality program designed for real estate professionals that will help encourage Best Practices and participation with formal practices.

The last event of GREPA’s annual activity calendar saw real estate industry professionals (particularly Agents and Brokers) receiving training on how to use the new XPOSURE MLS and its consumer facing LoopGhana at the Miklin Hotel, where the industry professionals were trilled and fascinated by the amazing features of the MLS technology.

At the end of the training, the participants and facilitators spent more time to connect and socialize, with the attendees discussing various industry setbacks, the need to push the Ghana Real Estate Bill (2014) to be passed and how the XPOSURE MLS and LoopGhana is going to help them as industry professionals.

A Multiple Listing System is:

• A facility for the orderly correlation and dissemination of listing information so participants will better serve their clients and the public.
• A means by which authorised participants to make blanket unilateral offers of compensation to other participants (acting as sub-agents, buyer agents, or in other agency or nonagency capacities defined by law)
• A means of enhancing cooperation among participants
• A means by which information is accumulated and disseminated to enable authorized participants to prepare appraisals, analyses, and other valuations of real property for bona fide clients and customers
• A means through which participants engaging in real estate appraisal can contribute to common databases

With the introduction of this MLS, more than half of the chaos in the property market will be replaced with an orderly and audited system that has enormous and unlimited benefits, which include a data management system; a tool to help listing brokers find cooperative brokers working with buyers to help sell their clients' homes.

The system provides trust and transparency to all member agents, since they all have access to information of a property as well as which agent has representative rights over it.

It also has data syndication which allows properties entered the MLS to be automatically published to other local and international online portals.

IDX- Internet Data Exchange which also enables real estate professionals to display the most comprehensive and up-to-date property listing data from the MLS on their own real estate websites. This means that agents who have their own websites will be able to pull all listing in the database onto their website.

It promotes Agency Relationships/Cooperation; buyers and sellers can work with a professional of their choice, confident that they have access to the most authentic largest pool of properties for sale in the marketplace.

The system is a research resource center for valuations, feasibilities and research, an efficient system to control property tax payment as well as ownership verification, it would serve as a perfect government resource and this is why the LoopGhana powered by XPOSURE is a game-changer for Ghana and the rest of Africa.