GREDA calls for revolving fund - To address country’s housing deficit
The Ghana Real Estate Developers Association (GREDA) has proposed the setting up of a revolving housing fund to provide long-term funding to help address Ghana’s housing deficit.
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The availability of long-term funding, it believes, will ease the cost of financing the construction of houses and thereby make the houses more affordable.
It has also recommended the acquisition of land banks by the government to help reduce the problems associated with land acquisition in the country which is hindering the delivery of affordable houses.
These and other recommendations were contained in a proposal on how to address the housing deficit presented by the President of GREDA, Mr Kwakye Dopoah Dei, to the Ministry of Works and Housing at the 2017 edition of the association’s breakfast meeting for chief executive officers in Accra yesterday.
Ghana’s housing deficit has been estimated to be 1.7 million units, requiring a minimum of 170,000 housing units annually for a 10-year period to offset, but experts believe that the deficit is more than that.
Yesterday’s meeting was on the theme: “Confronting the housing deficit: A call for innovation from all stakeholders”.
GREDA’s CEOs breakfast meetings have always served as a platform for industry players to engage the public sector and other key stakeholders on how to boost operations in the sector and help the government deliver the needed affordable houses.
They are also a platform to share some of the challenges facing the industry and make recommendations in relation to international best practices as part of measures to boost the private housing sector.
Tax cuts
Mr Dei said the sector was motivated to do more by the various tax cuts by the government and expressed GREDA’s gratitude to the government.
He described the various challenges confronting the housing sector as nothing new, saying they just required greater collaboration among stakeholders to deliver pragmatic results.
He said the theme for the meeting was a wake-up call to all stakeholders to have all hands on deck to address the housing problem.
“Although the solution is not far-fetched, Ghana seems to be overwhelmed by the problem,” he said.
He assured the government of the private sector’s commitment to partner the public sector to addresses the housing problem effectively.
Housing authority
In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Works and Housing, Mr Samuel Atta Akyea, said the government would fast-track the establishment of the National Housing Authority (NHA) to regulate the housing sector.
He also indicated that the government would facilitate the passage of the Real Estate Agency Bill and an amendment of the Rent Bill, the Ghana Building Code, among other interventions in the housing sector.
Mr Akyea said the increasing housing deficit required more innovation on the part of all stakeholders to address.
He said the government had decided to enhance and promote deeper co-operation with the private sector to find pragmatic solutions to the daunting housing problem in Ghana.
The minister said the government would engage players in the real estate industry in further deliberations to identify the bottlenecks in the sector and address them accordingly to facilitate better collaboration.