This material originally appeared as a chapter in W. Bello and J. Chavez (eds.) State of Fragmentation: The Philippines in Transition. Bangkok: Focus on the Global South.
This entry is the third of a four-part serialization.
Part I
Part II: The new rules of the game
Part IV: The city and the restoration of class power
All these transformations—the Philippine brand of neoliberalization, the unique vectors through which its economy globalized, and its uneven sectoral and geographical development—converge in urban real estate. Mirroring the trajectory of the economy as a whole, real estate development began the decade in crisis: the sector shrank from 2000 to 2002, hitting a 24.7 percent year-on-year contraction in the first quarter of 2001. But beginning with 2003, residential lot sales, coupled with office and retail space rental and leasing, have sustained record levels of growth: from the second quarter of 2004 until the fourth quarter of 2008, it sustained a double-digit streak, broken only twice by dips into high single-digit growth rates (see Figure 3). In the third quarter of 2006, the sector grew at a record pace of 26.2 percent year-on-year, breaking a record that was previously set in the third quarter of 1982. This record was broken yet again when the sector grew by 27.7 percent in the second quarter of 2010. At the end of its bust period in 2002, the gross value added of real estate development stood at approximately PhP8.8 billion. In 2010, it had grown to PhP22.1 billion.[1] If considered as a separate subsector, real estate was the second-fastest growing sector of the economy over the past decade, outpaced only by mining.
Kenneth Cardenas 