Understanding location and neighbourhood effects: An analysis of the housing submarkets in Accra – Ghana

Housing is a global phenomenon and is the heartbeat of almost everyone. It is seen as one of the fundamental needs of mankind and the long term focus of many developments across the world. In housing markets research it has been long established that location does matter. That suggests that real estate goods and services place a premium on location. Although this is the case, such location and neighbourhood characteristics are not traded explicitly and their contribution cannot be directly observed. However the contribution of location characteristics on housing markets research to professionals both in Valuation practice and planning authorities cannot be over-emphasised. This research focuses on analysing rental values at the neighbourhood level which has been neglected by researchers. The main goal of this thesis was to develop a model that could be used to disaggregate residential rental housing values and use it to explain location and neighbourhood effects of housing sub-markets in Accra. The thesis empirically highlights the perception of stakeholders in Accra’s housing market in order to identify and conceptualise commonalities and differences in variables that determine Residential Rental Values (RRVs); the empirical conceptualisation of rental values in Accra; determinants of RRVs; empirical examination of submarket existence; and the determination of the price premium of location and neighbourhood attributes on rental values. The thesis adopts a mixed research approach. Two approaches are broadly operationalised in achieving objectives in this thesis. The first is a perception survey to understand stakeholder views on the rental housing market, and the second was an empirical survey to understand price movements within the market. The dataset for the perception survey adopted a relative importance index to rank 38 different variables that have been utilised in the extant literature to determine RRVs. Using the stratified sampling technique, the population of experts and stakeholders with knowledge in ...