According to Numbeo, Ghana’s capital city, Accra, is the world’s second most expensive city in terms of the property price to income ratio.
The Price to Income Ratio is the basic measure for apartment purchase affordability, according to Numbeo, a crowd-sourced global database of reported consumer prices, perceived crime rates, quality of health care, and other statistics.
According to the website, “it is generally calculated as the ratio of median apartment prices to median familial disposable income, expressed as years of income.”
This comes amid protests about the city’s exorbitant property prices, which are fueling the #FixTheCountry movement.
Accra has surpassed Hong Kong (Hong Kong), Shenzhen (China), Moscow (Russia), Paris (France), and many other world-class cities.
Memphis, Tennessee, is the most affordable city in the world in terms of the property price to income ratio.
Numbeo also revealed that Accra has the highest mortgage percentage income ratio in the world, followed closely by Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Tehran (Iran), which are in second and third place, respectively.
Mortgage as a Percentage of Income is a ratio of the mortgage’s actual monthly cost to take-home family income.
“Average monthly salary is used to estimate family income. It assumes 100% mortgage is taken on 20 years for the house (or apt) of 90 square meters which price per square meter is the average price in the city centre and outside of city centre,” the site explained.
Memphis once again had the lowest Mortgage as a percentage of income to ratio.
Meanwhile, Accra has the lowest loan affordability in the world.
“Loan Affordability Index is an inverse of mortgage as a percentage of income,” the site said.
This means it is costlier to access a loan in Accra compared to other cities, including Lagos (Nigeria), Kabul (Afghanistan), Sao Paolo (Brazil) and Stockholm (Sweden) etc.
Numbeo is a global database of reported consumer prices, perceived crime rates, health care quality, and other statistics compiled by the public.
This year, it gathered information from 482 cities around the world.