HIDDEN CONDO GLUT

This is not for the faint-hearted.

When people talk about the Metro Manila condo oversupply, one number keeps getting repeated:

“Almost 8 years’ worth of inventory.”

It sounds dramatic. But what does it actually mean?

The math is surprisingly simple:

79,200 unsold Metro Manila condo units

divided by

10,100 units sold in 2025

= 7.84 years

Rounded off, that becomes roughly 8 years.

In plain English, this means that if developers stopped adding new supply today, and if buyers continued purchasing at the same pace as 2025, it would take almost 8 years to sell the current unsold developer inventory.

That is the important part: this is not a forecast. It is a shortcut.

It assumes that annual sales stay at around 10,100 units. If demand improves, the inventory life shortens. If demand weakens, it stretches out.

For example, if only 8,000 units are sold per year, then the same 79,200 units would take almost 10 years to clear.

But there is another issue.

That 79,200-unit figure refers to unsold developer inventory. It does not fully capture the secondary market: owners who bought units years ago and are now also trying to sell.

And that market is much harder to measure.

There is no clean public database showing every condo owner who wants to sell. You cannot simply ask every unit owner in Metro Manila whether their property is quietly available.

But if you are a broker, you can feel it.

So when we say there is “8 years’ worth of inventory,” even that may not capture the full competitive picture.

The developer inventory is already heavy.

But the real market feels heavier because developers are not only competing against other developers.

They are also competing against thousands of individual owners in the resale market.