WHEN DID METRO MANILA LAND PRICES REALLY START TO SOAR?

When did Metro Manila land prices really start to soar?

Not in the 70s. Not in the 90s either.

To track this, we used two villages. Forbes Park is the benchmark for the most expensive land in Metro Manila. Ayala Alabang Village, developed by the same developer, is a good proxy for what happens when an "up and coming" area matures.

In 1972, a square meter of lot in Forbes Park was worth around P200. By 2000 it had climbed to about P45,000. Big jump, sure. But then it barely moved for almost a decade. In 2009 it was still under P70,000.

Then something changed.

By 2014 it was P156,000. By 2018, P437,000. Between 2015 and 2019 alone, values more than doubled. Today we're looking at around P650,000 per sqm.

That means roughly 90% of the price growth in the last 54 years happened in just the last 15.

Ayala Alabang tells the same story at a different price point. From P373 per sqm in 1981 to about P202,000 today, with most of the climb also happening after 2010.

So if you've ever thought "I should have bought land back in the 80s," the bigger missed window may have been 2010.

So what drove the surge? That's a bigger story, and we'll break it down in future posts.