The President of the Ghana Association of Real Estate Brokers (GARIB), Jacob Adofo-Ansong, has called for a fundamental shift in Ghana’s housing development model, urging the prioritisation of affordable housing for everyday people.

He argued that Ghana’s housing development culture had long been oriented towards investors, the diaspora, and upper-income buyers, leaving most Ghanaians shut out of the formal housing market regardless of how many units were built.

Speaking on the sidelines of a stakeholder engagement jointly organised by GARIB and the Bank of Ghana’s Collateral Registry Department in Accra on Thursday, Mr Adofo-Ansong said the country had an affordability crisis and not the widely held notion of housing deficit.

The engagement was convened to deepen real estate professionals’ understanding of the Borrowers and Lenders Act 2020 (Act 1052) and the operations of the Bank of Ghana’s Collateral Registry.

“As we talk about 1.8 to two million housing deficits, there are about 1.5m housing lying vacant. So, what is the problem?” he asked, adding that “the problem is the the price.

“It is not affordable to Ghanaians because it was not built for Ghanaians. It is the system we need to work on.”

He called for an urgent and deliberate policy shift to ensure that housing development was anchored in what Ghanaians could afford to pay.

“From land acquisition and construction costs to financing structures, mortgage products, and rental pricing – all of which currently unite to push formal housing beyond the reach of ordinary income earners,” he argued, advocating a change.

Mr Adofo-Ansong called on developers and investors to see affordable housing not as a philanthropic exercise but as a commercially viable and strategically sound market opportunity.

He said Ghana’s growing population of young, urban workers has strong demand for affordable housing that the current market was not meeting, noting that developers could profitably fill the gap with the right financing and models.

He urged the government to support the private sector with land banks for affordable housing, developer incentives tied to affordability thresholds, and a dedicated financing facility offering long-tenor, low-cost mortgages for lower and middle-income Ghanaians.

He indicated that training would equip brokers with the right tools to conduct proper registry searches before listing or selling any property, which was essential to building a more transparent, trustworthy market.

He said when buyers, lenders, and investors could not trust the integrity of property transactions, financing costs increased, mortgage products became harder to access, and the market self-reinforcing in its exclusion of lower-income buyers.

Mr Fred Asiamah-Koranteng, Head of the Collateral Registry Department at the Bank of Ghana, In a speech read on his behalf, said the Act was introduced to address longstanding weaknesses in Ghana’s credit market.

That included information asymmetry, weak enforcement, and limited access to credit due to heightened lending risk, enabling real estate professionals to conduct proper searches before transacting any property.

He noted that conducting such searches was a vital step in minimising risk, preventing fraud, and safeguarding the investments of buyers, lenders, and the broader public, citing limited public awareness of the registry as a challenge that needed to be addressed.