What exactly are we pricing when we put a GH¢500,000 tag on a plot of land? This is the question accountant, career coach and SME development specialist Dickson Assan was left asking after months of searching for land across parts of Accra.
From Haatso and Agbogba to Abokobi, Frafraha and Oyarifa, Dickson Assan encountered asking prices running into hundreds of thousands of cedis, including GH¢800,000, GH¢900,000 and even GH¢1 million for some plots.
What frustrated him was not simply the high prices. It was the apparent absence of a transparent basis for determining them.
In many cases, he says, the answer seemed to be little more than: “This is what a plot in this area costs.”
But how was that price established? Dickson Assan argues that Ghana’s land market often operates on asking prices rather than actual transaction prices. One owner hears that another is asking GH¢400,000 and immediately decides his own plot should be GH¢450,000. The next sees GH¢450,000 and asks GH¢500,000.
Soon, asking prices begin setting asking prices. The result, he suggests, is a market where expectations can rise even when very few properties may actually be selling at those prices.
For Assan, this is fundamentally different from a transparent property market where buyers can examine recent comparable transactions and establish what similar plots have genuinely sold for.
His frustration deepens when land that has remained undeveloped for years is suddenly offered at enormous prices simply because surrounding development has increased its perceived value.
So what exactly determines the price of a plot? Is it its location? Infrastructure? Accessibility? Size? Actual comparable sales? Or simply what the owner believes someone might be willing to pay?
“Tell me why lands in and around Accra are selling for 1 million cedis, 900k, 800k and sometimes in Donald Trump dollars. Those that are 300k, 400k and the likes means you’re going farther from the city,” he recounted.
He continued that, “At one location, we were shown land in an area that was practically muddy and undeveloped. The asking price? GH¢350,000. In all of these, I kept asking myself: what exactly are we pricing? I agree there is a genuine demand issue and when demand exceeds supply, prices increase, ceteris paribus. But demand alone cannot explain everything we are seeing.”
Dickson Assan’s experience leaves him questioning whether Ghana has a functioning land-price discovery mechanism or a market where one person’s asking price becomes another person’s justification for asking even more.
