I made this short explainer for whenever someone asks me how a bank-financed property purchase works in the Philippines. Given the current real estate market, sellers may want to be more open to bank-financed buyers. It takes longer to get fully paid, but accepting bank financing can significantly widen the pool of potential buyers. The main problem with Bank-Financed purchases is this: The property is transferred to the buyer BEFORE the seller receives the bank-financed bala

Can you upload a land title to ChatGPT and ask it to plot the property? We decided to try it. We uploaded the technical description from a title and asked ChatGPT to plot the lot based on the bearings and distances. In less than two minutes, it produced a clean-looking diagram with boundary lines and labels. Impressive. It looked like exactly the kind of practical AI use that could save real estate professionals a lot of time. Then we checked the plot ourselves. The boundarie

A mystery shopper is someone hired by a company to pose as a regular customer and evaluate the actual customer experience. How quickly did the staff respond? Were they courteous and knowledgeable? Did they follow the proper process? Was the overall experience good enough to make you buy? I think real estate brokerages should be doing the same thing. Try sending an inquiry to your own brokerage using a name and number your team doesn’t recognize. Ask about one of your listings

Once upon a time, a broker was finally about to end a long dry spell. The deal was huge: two entire floors of an office building. The buyer was serious, negotiations were well underway, and because of the size of the purchase, they were asking the developer for a bigger discount than the published rates. But the numbers still weren't where the buyer wanted them. So the owner of the buyer's company decided to step in. Instead of continuing the negotiations through the broker,

In 1968, the country’s top companies and schools came together to establish a world-class business school: Asian Institute of Management (AIM). Ayala donated the Makati land that became AIM’s campus, in what is now Legazpi Village. Here’s a lesser-known part of the story. In the early 2000s, AIM was offered an exchange: its Makati property for a much larger land in Laguna. Back then, the Laguna property was practically in the middle of nowhere. Today, we know it as Nuvali. On

One of my favorite personal finance books is The Millionaire Next Door. The authors studied actual American millionaires to understand how they built and maintained their wealth. I highly recommend reading it. One concept that caught my attention was their formula for estimating what your net worth should be based on your age and income. It's a simple benchmark to see whether you're accumulating wealth at a pace similar to the millionaires they studied. Expected Net Worth (EN

Most people know that when someone passes away and leaves a property to several heirs, the estate can be settled through an Extra-Judicial Settlement of Estate (EJS). This allows the heirs to divide and transfer the property without going through a lengthy court proceeding. But what if the deceased left only one heir? This is where many people get confused. Since there's no one else to divide or partition the estate with, there's no need for an Extra-Judicial Settlement. Inst

Once upon a time, a developer had dozens of in-house brokers, but one consistently stood out. She was a top seller year after year. Wanting a bigger market, she eventually left the developer and became an independent broker. She started handling secondary-market properties, and before long, her sales had doubled. Later, she joined a brokerage firm. During tax season, she overheard her colleagues discussing their Income Tax Returns (ITRs) and BIR deadlines. She joined the conv

Many lease contracts require tenants to pay advance rent and a security deposit before moving in. Although they are often collected together, they serve different purposes. Advance rent is simply rent paid ahead of time, usually equivalent to two months' rent. Security deposits, on the other hand, are meant to answer for unpaid utility bills, property damage, and other obligations at the end of the lease. It should not be treated as unpaid rent. Here's a mistake I still see i

Back in 2015, the DPWH proposed building a vehicle underpass along Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue (formerly Buendia). The goal was to ease one of Makati's worst traffic bottlenecks. The plan was a four-lane, 570-meter tunnel passing beneath the Makati Avenue and Paseo de Roxas intersections. Construction was supposed to begin in June 2015 and finish by April 2017, with a budget of around P1.2 billion. At the time, DPWH projected it could cut traffic in the area by as much as 50%. So..