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WHY DID PROPERTY PRICES GO UP SO MUCH?
"Why did property prices go up so much?"
It's one of the questions I get asked most often. My take: because almost everything is concentrated in Metro Manila.
The best jobs, schools and hospitals sit in a handful of cities, so everyone competes to live close to them. In an earlier post, I wrote about how Metro Manila traffic pushes people to pay a premium just to shorten their commute. Limited land plus that kind of demand only moves prices one way.
That's why the size of an estate matters.
For this video, we drew 25 Luzon estates to scale. Rockwell Center is 15.5 hectares. BGC is about 240. Nuvali is about 2,500, roughly ten times the size of BGC. New Clark City, the government's planned city in Tarlac, is about 9,450.
Small, well-located estates can still be great places to live or invest. But the bigger the estate, the more room there is for its own schools, hospitals, offices, parks and retail. That's what lets people live, work and raise a family in one place without crossing the metro every day.
This is what the large estates outside Metro Manila are building: Nuvali, Vermosa, Alviera, Southwoods and LIMA, among others. If they succeed, they ease some of the pressure on the metro and give families a real alternative.
Big enough for schools, hospitals, parks and jobs. Big enough for a fresh start.
NOTES ON THE NUMBERS
Land areas are based on developer announcements and news reports as of 2026.
LIMA (1,600 ha) and Altaraza (640 ha) include announced expansions.
Makati CBD (508 ha), developed by Ayala Corporation, is our estimate based on its core barangays.
Circles show land area, not actual boundaries. Map locations are approximate.
