Market intelligence and data is fundamental market infrastructure for the housing finance sector. A key constraint undermining private sector participation and good policy engagement in affordable housing is the availability of data and market intelligence to facilitate risk-taking and decision-making. More accurate and transparent data serves as market infrastructure and improves decision-making, enables market segmentation and facilitates risk management, thereby facilitating investment and better-targeted policy making.

In 2019, the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF), Reall, and 71point4 partnered to develop a set of Market Shaping Indicators to help make key housing market data available and accessible. Consisting of 115 indicators throughout the housing value chain, the MSIs collate data from a wide range of international, national and local sources.

Data has been collected for 9 countries to date (Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Morocco, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), with work underway in Pakistan and India. In some cases, this data is already easily available, in others it is available but buried in documents that most people would never review, and in many cases it is data that has never been shared publicly before.