‘Deteriorated’ SSS houses blight Urdaneta Village, no renters except Jamby
If one wants an exhibit A whether the government is a good landlord or not, all one has to do is check the SSS-owned properties in Makati’s Urdaneta Village.
There, within the gated community of about 325 multi-million trophy homes, the Social Security Sytem owns four houses and, over and above the Ayala-imposed zoning regulations, another 12-unit townhouse complex. Of the four SSS houses, three have been vacant and unrented for years, with one of them, as the state pension agency itself admits, already having fallen into “deteriorated” condition.
The lone occupied house, on 33 Santo Domingo St., is meanwhile being rented by former senator Jamby Madrigal, with the Liberal Party candidate placing herself at the mercy of the SSS terminating the lease at any time after the standard five-year contract.
The five-year lease is apparently the spoiler provision that has been turning off potential renters that do not enjoy political leverage like Madrigal.
According to the Urdaneta Village grapevine, one potential lessee had wanted to rent the deteriorated bungalow, but backed off after the SSS, claiming the agency could be subject to the euphemistic “audit observation”, refused to extend the contract to a minimum of 10 years.
According to one estimate, at least P10 million would be needed to bring back the crumbling, vermin-infested bungalow to neighborhood standards.
The P10-million repair cost would translate to P166,000 a month in five years, on top of the P150,000 monthly lease SSS wants for the property.
A quick check with the online Lamudi property rental site showed a similar, ready-to-moveinto house and lot within Urdaneta is available for P190,000 a month, way below the estimated P315,000 a month needed for the deteriorated SSS bungalow.
Those who want an Urdaneta address, but are short on budget may instead consider the Casa Real townhouses which the SSS is offering for a monthly lease of about P350 a square meter, “subject to adjustment without prior notice.”
At a typical 260-sqm cut, the monthly rent for a Casa Real townhouse, excluding the mandatory repairs to be undertaken by the renter, should work out to about P90,000 a month.
That compares with the P100,000 a month asking rental price for an unfurnished three-bedroom condo unit at the Twin Towers or at the Ritz, both across the fence.
The SSS officials to see, just in case you are interested to move up into upper-crust Makati, are vice president for asset management Pedro Baoy and officer-in-charge for investment property Amado Gregorio Sopoco.
Money talks
• Luxury bayside hotels Solaire, Sofitel, Conrad, and even the budget Microtel have been booked solid since this weekend until well into the next weekend because of the ASEAN Summit.
The Solaire website yesterday did show a “limited” number of rooms still available for the week, but at a pain-inducing P16,000 a night (10 percent service charge and 12 percent VAT not yet included) for the lowest rate.
• Magsaysay Shipping COO Jesse Stefan Maxwell, a.k.a. the son of Doris Ho, is getting his own Manila Polo Club share.
And so do celebrity doctor and cosmetics magnate Vicki Belo and McDonald’s heiress Karen Kristine Yang.
Heard through the grapevine
A septuagenarian cousin of former labor secretary Nieves Confesor suffered a heart attack and is now semi-paralyzed after she found out that the life savings she had entrusted for investments to a certain Conrado Berenguer Topacio had evaporated.
This is incidentally the same Topacio that had inveigled $300,000 from the late short-story writer and poet Nina Estrada-Puyat in the late 1980s, and whose similar dissipation also triggered a heart attack and depression on the Edsa 1 heroine.
E-mail: moneygoround.manila@yahoo.com