Although the Philippines’ economy rode out the global financial crisis fairly well, 2009 was a difficult year for most protagonists in the country’s commercial Real Estate sector.
Over the course of the year, rental rates fell sharply in all three cities for which BMI has gathered data – Manila, Makati and Cebu. Worse, protagonists are far from confident that there will be a major recovery in the coming year or so. The conventional wisdom is that market rates will stabilise and/or rise by around 5% in the wake of the elections that are due for May 2010.
In Cebu especially, there appears to have been over-building of commercial Real Estate and consequent over-supply. However, our sources indicate that a more important problem has been the general lack of confidence about the prospects for the Philippines on the part of landlords/owners and tenants.
In most of the countries where real estate sectors are monitored by BMI, a slippage in rental rates during 2009 – in the wake of the global financial crisis – has resulted in a corresponding fall in yields. Typically, there are few or no transactions, so rental rates have fallen in relation to prices and capital values that were determined some time previously. In the Philippines, by contrast, it is very difficult to generalise about the movement in rental yields over the last year or so. In some sub-sectors, such as Makati offices and Cebu retail space, yields have actually risen sharply. In most others, they have tracked sideways or fallen. Our suspicion is that, in the areas where yields have risen (meaning that capital values have slipped sharply relative to rental rates which were falling) there have been a number of distressed sales.
Looking forward, we assume that yields will remain broadly unchanged over the next five years if they are already well into double-digits. In other sub-sectors, we anticipate that yields will rise gradually as investors assess that meaningful improvement in the Philippines’ business environment is unlikely. Interviews with our in-country sources were conducted in late March 2010.
Key Features Of This Report
This is the latest edition of a new series of industry reports published by BMI that seeks to identify the key dynamics of the real estate sectors of 44 countries around the world, some of which are developed and some of which are, in every sense, emerging markets. Once again, the questions that we seek to answer for each country remain as follows: What are the main issues that will matter to actors in and around real estate development in the country concerned, both over the long and the short term? What are the main constraints that they face? What are the key insights that one garners when one compares the real estate sector of the country concerned with its peers in other countries?
For Q3 we have introduced a very substantial new improvement to the reports. We have incorporated data and qualitative observations provided to us by commercial real estate agents operating in the countries we survey. As a result we have gained a much clearer picture of the balance between demand and supply in each of three main sub-sectors – office, retail and industrial. We have also introduced a new approach to the forecasting of rental yields, which is discussed in the methodology sector of this report.
For more information or to purchase this report, go here.
