Davao among PH top grosser in real estate fee collection

REAL property development in Davao City is enjoying a rapid growth that it landed the metropolis in the list of the 20 top grosser cities in the Philippines for real estate.

Lawyer Asteria Cruzabra, Land Registration Authority (LRA) director in Davao Region, said the city ranked 12th among the top grosser cities in terms of collection fees from real estate property developers. This puts the city as number one among other cities in Mindanao and even in Visayas.

"We surpassed even Cebu City. Our real estate industry is booming," Cruzabra said.

Cruzabra said the industry in Davao has not yet reached its plateau and that it is continuously growing today and in the coming years.

"It's very good and positive," Cruzabra said.

LRA records showed that it was able to collect close to P90 million registration fees from commercial, industrial and residential establishments. Meanwhile, the overall amount collected by LRA in the entire country reached P3 billion for 2011, up by 50 percent from P2 billion in 2010.

Cruzabra said in terms of income, real estate never really went down.

She also pointed out that LRA-Davao Region performed better, recognized for being the top six in terms of performance among other 16 regional offices in the country today.

Cruzabra is also seeing another boost in terms of performance because of the program known as Philaris, which allows them to generate land titles faster compared to previous years.

The computer-generated title processing started in 2009 and had since been generating an average of 480,000 titles in a year.

The voluntary title registration (VTR) was opened just last month for land owners planning to convert their manually issued land titles to a more secured e-title. So far, two only applied.
"The advantage is it would be safer now because all information are there in the data-base," Cruzabra said.

E-titles can also prevent the possibility of falsifying the documents, according to her.