Philippine Housing

[Admin]

I'm always going on that I don't like the Philippines, but then I only tried war torn Mindanao ???

I'm always on the lookout for good deals and came across this site http://www.megaworldinternational.com

They have new bungalows on recently built compounds starting at less than £8,000!!! Compared to over here we could by the whole street ;D

I'm actually considering buying another property (have one near Davao), and using it as maybe a holiday home. Bloody quicker to nip backwards & forwards to Singapore whne we find an apartment there.

Sick of this country, but have to wait for the kids to leave school, well my lad anyway in 1.5 years.

[peterdavid]

You obviously have far more faith in the Philippine legal system and property/land law than I do!! Buying a house in the Philippines is easy (despite the fact a foreigner technically shouldn't be able to do it unless they have been granted a temporary resident's visa as a result of marriage with a filipina), but disposing of it, renting it or even maintaining it can be a nightmare.

And as for new build - having lived in the Philippines for a few years and only just returned to England, I saw endless stories on ABS-CBN of new build houses which, after 6 months, starting crumbling, sinking, collapsing or cracking up, and the response of the mighty and (in a society like the Philippines) untouchable building corporations was to simply say it's not their problem, and say that obviously the purchaser did something wrong with their house for it to start falling apart because there was nothing wrong with their building skills. That's every house in the compound, every owner must have made the same mistake.

Unlike here, there is no legal redress (unless you want to spend millions of pesos and spend 10 years fighting the mega rich developers in the courts, and lets face it, they fight dirty, their first defence would no doubt be that as a foreigner, you shouldn't have been allowed to buy it in the first place), so I, personally, would think twice before putting capital into the Philippine housing market. It was something I considered during my time there but ultimately decided not to, for all the above reasons of uncertainty. And anyway, rental is so low there that you could probably rent the same place for 20 years and still pay less than what it would cost to buy.

That being said, it's only 8 grand, so even if it does all go belly up, it's not going to break the bank.

Peter the Pessimest ;D

[Admin]

£8000 is about 1/2 a days normal turnover for my betting, I'd probably buy the street and move house as each one falls apart :)

[peterdavid]

;D Problem solved then. By the time you reached the end of the street, the first house might just about be renovated again.

Is your plan to move there permanently then?

[Admin]

If it falls down, we'd just build a new one, but they are little different than the crap they build in this country now. They built a new estate in the next village 2 years ago, everyone who first moved in has gone as the property is a disaster area.

We're currently looking for property in Singapore, we'll buy another house in Northern Philippines to spend a few weeks a year in, and our friends can use it, and next year we'll be having a nose around Florida for something. Still keep the property in Wales though, as the family is still here.