ABOUT GREPA
Ghana Real Estate Professionals Association (GREPA)
GREPA is a professional trade association set up in 2011 to bring real estate Professionals Ghana together for purposes of promoting the goals of its members which include and not limited to the following:
- Introducing and maintaining ethics and standards of practice
- Advocate and support the regulation of the industry through legislation.
- Providing an opportunity for local and international networking.
- Encourage harmony, cooperation and collaboration among members and other institutions
- To contribute and support the campaign for real estate transparency in Africa through data
GREPA’s initiatives promotes and protects a fundamentally sound and dynamic real estate market and fosters a vibrant community in Africa. In 2015, GREPA started public policy initiatives:
- Planned a 5-day working visit for a 9 member parliamentary delegation from Ghana.
- Assisted in reviewing the Ghana Real Estate Bill which had been initiated 2014
- In collaboration with local, state and national real estate associations, GREPA assisted in organizing and facilitating programs to educate and furnish the delegates with tools to assist them in formulating a comprehensive bill.
LEGISLATION & ADVOCACY (Ghana Real Estate Agency Bill)
The Real Estate Licensing Act would help eliminate fraud, dishonesty, unfair practices and improve competition in the industry. The involvement of the government body in the industry would help protect consumers by ensuring that all Real Estate professionals are licensed and properly educated. It believes that knowledgeable Real Estate Agents and Brokers would be able to competently carry out their tremendous responsibilities responsibly and bring a high degree of professionalism into the industry.
The need to improve the image of the real estate industry in Ghana and pass a Real Estate Licensing Act which will protects the public, bring transparency and best practices in within the industry led a Nine-Member Parliamentary Delegation on a 7 day work to visit Chicago from August 2nd to August 8th 2015.
The delegation was made up of members from a joint committee on Water, Works & Housing and the Committee on Lands and Forestry.
GREPA’s IMPORTANT MILESTONES
- NAR Cooperating Association & Affiliations (FIABCI, IESC)
The Real Estate Association achieved it's first and biggest milestone in 2015 when GREPA signed a Bilateral Cooperation agreement with the NAR of the United States and further aligned itself with other international organizations including the International Real Estate Federation (FIABCI), and the International Ethics Standards Coalition (IESC)
- Inbound & Outbound Trade Missions
GREPA with the support if the NAR has organized trade missions to the U.S for members of Ghana's Parliamentary Committees on Works & Housing and Lands & Forestry as well as executives of Ghana Institute of Surveyors. This collaboration allowed GREPA and NAR's contributions of wide range of industry resources into the formulation and draft of Ghana's Real Estate and Housing Bill.
- GREPA being the first Real Estate Professionals Association in West Africa has also organized trade missions for qualified NAR members to travel to Ghana to impart and transfer knowledge to organized industry practitioners in the first ever real estate training that addresses the need for real estate professional practice in Africa.
- Education (CCIM Foundation-2015 ABR, Lead Gen. CoE – 2016, Epro, CoE, Global markets-2018 Real Estate Finance, Negotiation, MLS Training, Staging & Photography-2019)
GREPA Facilitated commercial Real Estate certification programs through CCIM and has also facilitated a number of training workshops to Association members numbered around 400 and other industry players in Ghana over the last 5 years, the last of said series of training ended in September 2019.
- Association Executives Award - Highly Commanded badge in the Best Membership Initiative campaign Leadership Award 2019
- Legislative support – Stakeholder contribution on Ghana real estate Bill. Last stakeholder meeting 11/7/2019
- XPOSURE MLS with its public facing LoopGhana.com 2019
GREPA has achieved another huge milestone 2019 with introduction of the first Multiple Listing System (MLS) into the industry's market, the first of its kind in Africa.
The LoopGhana MLS
The LoopGhana MLS was born out of the ‘’Ghana Scorecard’’ recommendations by the International Property Market Scorecard project which summarized that a critical, but missing component in the evolution of the industry has been the wide-spread education of professionals in the real estate industry. Without knowledge-transfer to industry professionals and subsequently to their clients, there can be only limited improvement to market functionality, regardless of the volume of aid investment or degree of improvement to policies, processes, or data collection.
Earlier this year GREPA launched a Multiple Listing Service platform powered by XPOSURE with a consumer facing side dubbed LoopGhana https://listings.loopghana.com/.
With increased capital flow and globalization of Africa’s real estate markets, general data remains limited. There has been limited or no transaction data reported, valuation standards, data integrity, and transparency issues in these emerging markets in Africa.
A Multiple Listing System is:
• A facility for the orderly correlation and dissemination of listing information so participants will better serve their clients and the public.
• A means by which authorised participants to make blanket unilateral offers of compensation to other participants (acting as sub-agents, buyer agents, or in other agency or nonagency capacities defined by law)
• A means of enhancing cooperation among participants
• A means by which information is accumulated and disseminated to enable authorized participants to prepare appraisals, analyses, and other valuations of real property for bona fide clients and customers
• A means through which participants engaging in real estate appraisal can contribute to common databases
With the introduction of this MLS, more than half of the chaos in the property market will be replaced with an orderly and audited system that has enormous and unlimited benefits, which include a data management system; a tool to help listing brokers find cooperative brokers working with buyers to help sell their clients' homes.
The system provides trust and transparency to all member agents, since they all have access to information of a property as well as which agent has representative rights over it.
The system also has data syndication which allows properties entered into the MLS to be automatically published to other local and international online portals.
IDX- Internet Data Exchange which also enables real estate professionals to display the most comprehensive and up-to-date property listing data from the MLS on their own real estate websites. This means that agents who have their own websites will be able to pull all listing in the database onto their website
It promotes Agency Relationships/Cooperation; buyers and sellers can work with a professional of their choice, confident that they have access to the most authentic largest pool of properties for sale in the marketplace.
The system is a research resource center for valuations, feasibility and research, an efficient system to control property tax payment as well as ownership verification, it would serve as a perfect government resource and this is why the LoopGhana powered by XPOSURE is a game-changer for Ghana and the rest of Africa.