Residential market as an investment vehicle in Ghana

Globalization of all forms of real estate investment has increasingly demanded that performance benchmarks of high quality and international standards be made accessible to investors and fund managers. For the first time in Ghana, residential price and rent series are developed from hedonic models. These time series are, in turn, used to generate other performance indicators – measures of investment yields and total returns (nominal and real) – in a rapidly growing residential real estate market, using transaction-based data from Accra and Tema, the dominant markets. Having generated performance indicators for the real estate market, this paper also conducts a further quantitative and comparative analysis of real estate market against other investment vehicles in the country.The final section provides an international context for the performance of Ghanaian residential investment market, from the viewpoint of a US resident investor. Overall, residential total returns have run at annualised rate made up of a relatively stable income return and highly volatile capital growth between 1992 and 2007. Across investment markets, the differences in long-run returns have been in large part driven by variation in rates of rental value growth.