Filipinos working abroad fuel real estate boom at home

MANILA — The Philippines’ famous diaspora of overseas workers is fuelling a boom in the real estate market back home as they snap up houses and apartments to safeguard their futures.

Property prices have recovered strongly since the global financial crisis of 2008, with investments from the nine million Filipinos toiling away in foreign lands a significant factor, industry figures say.

“Overseas workers are moving the market. Properties now are selling and when there is demand, prices go up,” Emily Duterte, head of the Real Estate Brokers Association of the Philippines, told AFP.

Industry sales nationwide this year are estimated to hit P300 billion ($6.9 billion) compared with about P100 billion each in 2009 and 2008, according to Claro Cordero from Jones Lang La Salle, a global real estate consultancy firm.

“Nobody thought there would be such a quick recovery from the slump that began in 2008,” said Cordero, research head of the company’s Philippines’ branch.

Filipino workers abroad have a reputation for working as lower-paid employees, such as construction workers, maids, sailors and janitors.

But their sheer magnitude — they account for about 10 percent of the Philippine population — mean they have long been a major force in the economy.

In 2009, they sent home $17.3 billion, making up more than 10 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to government data.

And Filipinos are increasingly moving into higher-paid sectors, such as medicine, engineering and the media.

Overseas workers usually opt for houses costing about P2 million ($45,000), humble by foreign standards but well in the middle-class bracket for Filipinos, according to Duterte from the brokers’ association.

Fifty-year-old merchant seaman Rodolfo Oliverio has spent most of his working life outside of the Philippines but he is an active player in the domestic real estate market.

Oliverio has used his overseas earnings to buy two small houses in the heart of Manila for his wife and children to live in, and he is paying for a third he recently bought just outside the nation’s capital.

“If you work here, nothing will happen. The salaries are too small. The only way to afford a house is to become an overseas worker,” Oliverio told AFP while on his annual vacation in Manila.

“Naturally, among overseas workers, the most important thing is a house and lot.”

Oliverio said that as a ship’s bosun — the crew’s foreman — for a foreign company, he earned about P82,800 a month, roughly four times more than he could earn doing the same job with a local cargo line.

With his salary, he said he was confident he could afford the repayments on his third house, a middle-class 42-square-meter (452-square-feet) place south of Manila which cost a little over P1.5 million.

Industry observers said Oliverio’s real estate goals were typical of many overseas workers. AFP