Tech addresses housing backlog
Overseas Filipino workers, the bulk of whom are from Cavite and Batangas, are eager to buy homes in their hometowns or make investments in surrounding metropolitan regions’ real estate.
After a survey on the Philippine real estate market’s outlook found foreign developers wanted to invest in the local real estate industry primarily to infuse in projects that will address the housing backlog, Proptech Consortium of the Philippines is proposing the use of digitalization to solve the housing backlog.
According to Lamudi’s quarterly report on the Philippine real estate market, Singapore was the top foreign country having queries for condominiums and homes for sale.
Lamudi noted that listings priced at P6 million and below accounted for more than half of all leads for residential properties up for sale on its website.
Meanwhile, businessmen and professionals are also striving to enter the nation’s commercial real estate market.
The United States and Australia, the two countries with the largest service outsourcing markets, took the lead in rental inquiries for commercial space.
Lamudi pointed out that the Middle Eastern cities of Dubai, Doha, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, as well as Singapore, received the highest requests for houses and other real estate properties in the CALABARZON region in the second quarter of 2022.
It further stated that overseas Filipino workers, the bulk of whom are from Cavite and Batangas, are eager to buy homes in their hometowns or make investments in surrounding metropolitan regions’ real estate.
Close gap on housing
During the celebration of the real estate group Proptech Consortium of the Philippines’ first anniversary, its co-founding director and chairperson Emma Imperial said that technology and digitization can help fix the housing gap in the country, which is seen to hit 6.5 million units by 2030.
However, she said that digitization must flourish first for the nation to deliver the necessary homes quickly and cater to the needs of those who want to invest in the real estate industry in the country.
This entails inviting more financial technology industries to invest, spending money on digital infrastructures that will speed up these transactions, altering how the banking system thinks, and creating laws that will encourage developers to build more socially conscious housing, among other things.
“If we have a lot of transparency and speed in our development world, we can do more,” Imperial said, noting that only 200,000 units are expected to be produced annually for now.
“There is that kind of challenge to us and what we do is that the technology can really bring the less fortunate among Filipinos this kind of opportunity to have world-class and sustainable houses,” Imperial added.