We went to Accra this December after a few years ago and i noticed a trend in the property market. Properties are overpriced, sometimes even higher than cities in more ‘advanced’ (pardon my use of this word) countries. We saw properties in poor infrastructure areas which were more expensive than similar properties in London.

It got me thinking that how will the working person able to afford these, given the average wages of workers and profit margins of small-to-medium businesses.

It is obvious that most of these home will be snatched off the market by foreigners, Ghanaians in the diaspora and the super rich locals. Moreover, landlords allegedly prefer foreigners and ‘diasporans’ to locals (we saw this first hand).

Thus, they’ll continue to push the average person far out of the city and expect them to commute to the city to work. This becomes even worse considering the poor transport infrastructure.

What do you guys think about this? Is it an inevitable consequence of ‘development’? Can something be done about property prices?

I know this is common practice in many big cities across the world. However, do you think we could do something different?