Residential market development in sub‐Saharan Africa

There is a general consensus that residential submarkets exist, but the basis upon which these are specified remains the subject of debate. The purpose of this paper is to model data on different residential locations in Ghana to show how the submarkets have performed over the past 16 years.

The paper employs hedonic modelling based on 3,250 sale transactions and 1,130 rental transactions from 1992 to 2007.

The results demonstrate that five residential real estate characteristics – location, detached, landscaping quality, gross internal areas and plot size – predominate in the explanation of both rental and transactions prices across all submarkets. They also highlight points of variation between the submarkets. An understanding of the impact of these features on residential price and rent is important for capital and rental valuation.

This paper analyses historic performance of the residential market, both at the aggregate and disaggregate level to place the housing market in an investment context.