Ho!Ho!Ho! 11 for-sale Forbes houses breach P1B; highest asking P1.5B
Wanted: 11 billionaires shopping for new homes this Christmas.
Eleven for-sale house-and-lots in Forbes Park have breached the P1-billion price tag, with the highest asking for a whopping P1.5 billion, according to various property listings.
The highest, at P1.5 billion, is a five-bedroom house on a 5,000-square-meter lot, listed by Great Success Realty through Lamudi, without giving its actual address.
(Great Success’ listed president is Rene J. Sarmiento, who retired in 2015 as senior vice president of China Bank.)
The second highest, also posted at the Lamudi website, is a 4,925-sqm meter lot with what looks like a vacant ’70sera house, with an asking price of nearly P1.35 billion. That works to P260,000/sqm, which means that the house is being thrown in for free.
To think that Manny Pacquiao already raised eyebrows when the boxer paid about P150,000/sqm just seven years ago for his then brand-new home within the same neighborhood. The exchange rate at that time was around P44-$1.
Incidentally, the street where Pacquiao lives, Cambridge Circle, the main circumferential road within North Forbes, has the most number of P1-billion homes for sale, seven in all.
According to Property 24, the most expensive of the seven is by the Cambridge Road fork, a 3,400-sqm spread with a list price of P1.2 billion. That works out to P350,000/sqm.
The fine print is that the Cambridge Road property has a tenant whose lease is good up to 2023.
Meanwhile, those seeking for proper provenance, the former Zobel home along McKinley Road is also on the block.
At an asking price of P862.5 million net, the ex-Zobel property works out to P300,000/sqm net, with the still intact house designed by architect Ramon Antonio thrown in as bonus.
The downside? The property is not only along gridlocked McKinley, it is also by the busy Tamarind gate.
Incidentally, when the Zobel clan first offered Forbes Park for sale in 1948, the going rate for the still cogonal suburban subdivision was P8/sqm, payable in installment. (Money-Go-Round owes this historical tidbit to former San Lorenzo resident, now Seattlebased Lou Goupal, with his outstanding Manila Nostalgia blog.)
That means at the present asking price of P300,000/ sqm, the Forbes Park property price has multiplied by 37,500 times in 70 years, which translates to an average yearly increase of an incredible 535 percent!
E-mail: moneygoround.manila@yahoo.com