Buying property in Ghana from abroad.

Start with your passport, not the plot

The single biggest fork in the road is your citizenship, and it is the one most people discover last. Under the Land Act 2020 (Act 1036), a non-citizen cannot be granted a leasehold longer than fifty years at any one time, and any agreement that purports to give a non-citizen a freehold interest is void — not weakened, void.

Ghanaian citizens are not held to that ceiling, and terms of up to ninety-nine years are common. What matters here is that citizenship is the test, not residence. Living in Maryland or Milton Keynes for thirty years does not make you a non-citizen. Holding only a foreign passport does.

Ghana permits dual citizenship, and a dual citizen is a citizen for this purpose. If that describes you, it is worth confirming your status is formally documented before you are at the signing stage rather than after — it is the difference between a fifty-year interest and a ninety-nine-year one. The same section treats a company as a non-citizen if more than forty per cent of its equity is held by non-citizens, which catches a good number of buyers who had planned to purchase through a company for other reasons.

“Freehold” usually is not

A great deal of Ghanaian land is stool, skin, clan or family land, and the Act prohibits the creation of a freehold interest in it altogether. The underlying allodial title sits with the stool or the family, and it is not something an individual buys — whatever the word on the document says.

So when land is described as bought “from a chief,” what is almost always changing hands is a derivative interest, a lease granted out of that allodial title. That is not a problem in itself; it is how most of the country holds land. It is only a problem when a buyer believes they have bought something more absolute than they have. Where the land is family land, a valid sale generally needs the documented consent of the head of family and the principal members — a requirement quietly skipped in a lot of disputed transactions.

You own it when it is registered, not when you have paid

This is the sentence worth re-reading. A signed agreement, a paid price, a receipt and a thick folder of the seller’s own documents do not make you the owner. Registration at the Lands Commission does.

It matters because Ghana does not yet have a single, fully digitised national title registry. That gap is what makes it possible — and, by every account we have read, not rare — for one plot to be sold to several buyers who each hold paperwork that looks convincing. When that unravels, the question is rarely who paid first. It is who registered.

The order of the paperwork

Doing these in the wrong sequence is one of the more common causes of a file stalling for months:

1. An official search at the Lands Commission — before any money moves. It is what surfaces competing claims, existing charges, pending litigation and prior sales of the same plot.
2. A site plan you commissioned — prepared or verified by a licensed surveyor you instructed, and checked against the physical ground. Not the seller’s plan, and not the seller’s surveyor.
3. The indenture — drafted or reviewed by your own lawyer, describing the land by reference to that plan and stating plainly what interest is being conveyed and for how long.
4. Stamp duty — paid to the Ghana Revenue Authority. The instrument has to be stamped before the Lands Commission will accept it, and submitting in the wrong order is exactly where files sit.
5. Registration at the Lands Commission — ending in a certificate of title or a registered deed.

We have deliberately left the fees and the duty rate out. Published figures disagree with one another and with the current schedules often enough that quoting one here would do you a disservice — confirm them with the Lands Commission, the GRA or your lawyer at the time you transact. Expect the whole process to be measured in months rather than weeks, and expect to have to chase it; the Commission does not generally call you when something needs attention.

What is different about doing it from four thousand miles away

Everything above is true for a buyer standing in Accra. Distance changes the risk in three specific ways: you cannot look at the land, you are relying on someone else’s account of what is happening, and you are slower to notice when something has gone quiet.

The practical protections are unglamorous and they work. Instruct your own lawyer rather than accepting the seller’s, and confirm the licence through the Ghana Bar Association. Instruct your own surveyor. Pay through traceable banking channels against receipts, never to a personal account or a mobile-money number. Treat urgency as information: pressure to pay before a search completes, reluctance to let your people inspect, and a price noticeably under the market are the three things that recur in almost every account of a transaction that went wrong.

If you grant a power of attorney, keep it narrow. Name the specific property, cap the price, set an expiry date, and require your attorney to report at each stage. Have it notarised where you are and authenticated at a Ghanaian mission before it travels. Forged and expired powers of attorney, and attorneys quietly acting beyond what they were given, are a recognised category of problem rather than a freak occurrence — a narrow, dated instrument is most of the defence.

What changes when you buy a finished home instead

Buying a completed home from a developer removes some of this and moves the rest. The developer has already dealt with the land, the consents and the build, so you are not managing a site from another continent. What you are doing instead is taking on trust that the developer did it properly — which means the diligence does not disappear, it just points somewhere else.

These are the questions we think you should put to any developer in Ghana, including us. A developer who is uncomfortable answering them in writing has told you something useful.

• What interest do you hold in the land, and may I see it? Not a description of it — the document.
• What exactly will I hold at completion: a lease, for how many years, and running from when?
• Has a Lands Commission search been run on this site, and may my lawyer run their own?
• What is the payment schedule tied to — calendar dates, or verified stages of construction?
• Where does my money sit between payment and completion, and can it be held in escrow if I ask?
• What happens to what I have paid if the development does not complete?

Ask your own lawyer to read the answers. We would rather be chosen by someone who checked.