Surveying & Built Environment Vol. 22 Issue 1 (December 2012)

provide answers to the questions,
and one-third of respondents
were nonresponsive to the same
questions. Non respondents also
included two heads of households
who credited the Grace of God
….and a Foreign Aunty as a source
of funds but would not elaborate.
There are other reasons for the dearth of
information about property transactions,
such as tax avoidance. That is, some
people buy or sell (for an analysis, see,
for example, Sinai, 1998; Antwi and
Adams, 2003; Abdulai and Ndekugri,
2007; Karley, 2009), but do not usually
report those transactions. Not all nonreporting
can be attributed to cultural
practices or an attempt to avoid tax.
Some people do want to record their
transactions in landed property but
may be discouraged from doing so
because of administrative delays,
arising, from under resourced planning
offices (Gough and Yankson, 2003), red
tapeism (see Gambrah, 2002, pp.24-
27), and corruption in the land sector
agencies (Centre for Democracy and
Development, 2000; Mensah et. al.,
2003), among others. A rather different
type of reason for the severe dearth
of information in Ghana is that some
traditional houses (e.g., family houses
or abusua fie) are rarely exchanged
in the market because they have
sentimental, rather than market, value
(see, for example, Korboe and Tipple,
1995, p.271).
There is some limited market
information, but it is tainted by special
and cultural relationships between
buyers and sellers (see Korboe
and Tipple, 1995). Not all cases of
information asymmetry are structural.
Others are self-imposed. For instance,
although unlicensed real estate
Surveying and Built Environment Vol 22, 37-60 Nov 2012 ISSN 1816-9554
agents are knowledgeable about land
transactions because they facilitate
transactions in land; most valuers do
not consult them because they feel the
agents are untrained in formal valuation
methods (Obeng-Odoom, 2011). In
turn, valuers find it extremely difficult
to use the Market Comparison Method
to estimate value.
Using the Investment method of
valuation is equally difficult. The
inflationary nature of the Ghanaian
economy (see Asafu-Adjaye, 2008
for a discussion of the causes) poses
problems for the assumption that the
full rental value of an interest would
remain stable. This problem raises
doubts about the feasibility of the
all-risks-yield which is used in the
Investment Method of Valuation.
However, in practice, increasing the
yield to account for inflation has often
led to ridiculously low capital values. In
theory, a real value approach could be
adopted to account for inflation (Crosby,
2007), however, other problems, such
as special relationships among market
actors make it difficult to determine
what really is the market and ascertain
the nature of outgoings. So, the same
factors that hinder the application of the
Market Comparison approach plague
the Investment Method too.
Turning to the Profit Method, similar
concerns apply. Although it does
not come up against the problem of
information asymmetry in the property
market, the unrecorded nature of the
Ghanaian economy brings new sets of
problems. Many restaurants operate
‘off the books’ and ‘without books’. It
is estimated that between 51 (Ghana
Statistical Service, 2008) and 80
(International Labour Organisation,
2009, p.12) per cent of economic
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