Coronavirus knocks P500M off Pacquiao’s Forbes property price, asking down to P1.5 B
The coronavirus pandemic has hit boxing legend Senator Manny Pacquiao with a low blow.
From an original P2 billion when it went into the market in early February, the price tag for PacMan’s North Forbes Park home has now been cut to P1.5 billion, a 25 percent reduction.
The five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 10-car garage house along Cambridge Circle was relisted over the weekend by property24. com with the reduced asking price, adding that the “celebrity owned” residence is vacant and ready to move into.
Pacquiao and family, in the meantime, have chosen to stay in a rented house in the more affordable Dasmariñas Village, on the other side of McKinley Road.
The property website features 21 photos of PacMan’s Forbes house, which, if one zooms in and looks closely, displays framed photographs of the people’s champ and his family in a number of rooms.
According to press reports at that time, the North Forbes house was acquired brand new by Pacquiao in 2011 from banker Lorenzo Tan for P388 million.
That sale incidentally had set a new high in Forbes, propelling nearly a decade of real estate rally in Makati and the nearby Fort, a record run that COVID-19 now seems to have abruptly ended.
PacMan had the house renovated only last year, apparently to justify the original asking price of P2 billion.
Pacquiao wife Jinkee even showed Instagram photos of herself replacing the original travertine stone tiles with porcelain, a public display that triggered an apoplectic fit and a public lecture from travertine stone supplier David Kaufman about the culturati and their finer points.
But that, as they say, is another story.
Pandemic pulls down other Forbes prices
The coronavirus pandemic also seems to have pulled down prices of other Forbes Park houses besides PacMan’s.
The first property in South Forbes to carry a P1 billion price tag, unsold since it was put on the market in 2013, has now been reduced to asking potential buyers to “contact the agent for price.”
The most expensive house, with a Shangri-La Makati-like winding staircase with a corresponding grand price tag of P1.7 billion, has found only Scarlett O’Haras but no Rhett Butler since the October 2018 listing.
The Lamudi website over the weekend had only four Forbes properties with over a billion price tag, unlike two Christmases ago when a dozen were listed on the digital marketplace.
Because of the coronavirus shutdown, Colliers Philippines is projecting a five to15 percent drop in Metro Manila land values for the year, with condominium prices similarly falling within the same range. Maybe even worse.
Despite the gloom and doom, a half-a-hectare vacant lot in South Forbes, the lone remaining land of its size within the billionaires’ village, is still listed at the pre-COVID-19 price of P1.75 billion.
That still works out to P350,000/sqm, a 58,333 times catapult from the original P6/sqm when Forbes Park was first offered for sale in 1949.
Heard through the grapevine
After being hit by outages in recent days, Iloilo City will suffer a 13-hour shutdown this Sunday, with MORE Power deciding to rush repair and replacement works of the city’s aging substation and spaghetti feeder lines before power usage surges again with next month’s lifting of the lockdown regime.
The displaced Panay Electric, on the other hand, appears to have been energized by the outages, with the Cacho clan publicly sniping at Enrique Razon’s MORE Power for alleged lack of experience in running a power utility.
E-mail: moneygoround.manila@yahoo.com