The Bank of Ghana (BoG) and the Ghana Association of Real Estate Brokers (GAREB) have held a joint engagement in Accra to train property brokers and agents on how to use the central bank’s Collateral Registry to verify whether assets have been pledged as loan security before they are placed on the market.
The session focused on the operations of the registry under the Borrowers and Lenders Act 2020 (Act 1052), which established the registry as a national repository of security interests in both movable and immovable assets. Officials said a persistent gap between the registry’s formal role and its actual usage by the property sector was creating conditions for fraud, double-pledging of assets and financial losses for unsuspecting buyers.
Rosemary Akabutu, Deputy Head of the Collateral Registry Department at the Bank of Ghana, said the reforms behind the registry were designed to reduce information asymmetry and strengthen lenders’ confidence in Ghana’s credit market. She said the collateral registry had recorded 1.92 million secured transactions and 3.2 million assets since 2010, but that awareness and utilisation among property professionals and the public remained insufficient.
GAREB president Jacob Ansong said brokers had engaged the central bank specifically to close a knowledge gap that was leaving agents exposed to legally and financially compromised property listings without their knowledge.
“Before we put any property on the market, we must know whether or not it has been used for that purpose,” Ansong said.
He acknowledged that real estate brokerage in Ghana had historically operated on personal relationships and informal trust rather than systematic due diligence, and that the sector’s exposure to fraud and unlicenced operators had damaged public confidence in property transactions.
The engagement also addressed Ghana’s broader real estate regulatory landscape, following passage of the Real Estate Agency Act 2020 (Act 1047), which established the Real Estate Agency Council as the sector’s legal regulator and introduced licencing requirements for agents and brokers. Ansong said enforcement of those requirements would intensify in the coming weeks, with the Council planning to inspect firms and operators to curb illegal practices.
A striking observation from Ansong concerned the nature of Ghana’s housing challenge. He argued that the widely cited deficit of 1.8 to 2 million housing units overstates the supply dimension of the problem, noting that approximately 1.5 million housing units currently sit vacant across the country.
“The problem is cost, the price,” he said. “It is not affordable for Ghanaians.”
Industry players and officials agreed that stronger enforcement of the collateral registry search requirement and tighter professional licencing could also improve access to mortgage financing by reducing risk within the banking sector, where property-backed lending has been hampered by unclear ownership records and contested collateral arrangements.
