A GLOBAL retail estate company has listed Bacolod City as one of the notable locations for real estate sector development in the country, based on this year’s performance and 2018 outlook.
In terms of commercial offices, Colliers International Philippines listed Bacolod as well as other areas, including Quezon, Pampanga, Cebu, Davao and Iloilo, as notable locations primarily for co-working space, SM malls, and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO).
The company also included Bacolod along with Cebu and Palawan as notable locations for hotel development.
The city’s performance is in fact projected to increase next year especially with trends like three to four-star hotels and resort-oriented developments, it added.
Joey Roi Bondoc, research manager of Colliers International Philippines, said the country’s property sector remains upbeat as it is fueled by a robust macroeconomic environment.
“We encourage developers and tenants to take advantage of the country’s buoyant macroeconomic backdrop by implementing measures like, for mall operators, complementing their physical stores with expanded presence on online selling platforms to maximize the Filipinos’ rising disposable incomes and proliferation of e-commerce throughout the country,” he added.
For commercial offices, Colliers said the rising vacancy is an opportunity to expand and consolidate.
For Bacolod, the company had earlier reported that the city’s overall vacancy in second quarter of 2017 eased to 6.9 percent from 14.7 percent of the same period last year.
This is due to the significant decline in Negros First Cyber Centre’s vacancy, it said.
Colliers sees overall vacancy in the city rising only marginally to about eight percent over a year as a number of online English tutorial and health information management (HIM) firms have already expressed interest to expand operations in Bacolod.
“Despite the slowdown in business process outsourcing (BPO) transactions, net office space take-up for the first three quarters of the year reached 3.8 million square feet, still on track to reaching 5.9 million square feet,” it said.
For hotel development, the company said the focus is on resort projects.
Bondoc said the other services subsector which covers hotels, restaurants, and recreational and cultural activities grew by 7.7 percent in third quarter of this year, up from 6.8 percent in the same period in 2016.
“The hotels and restaurant subsector continues to drive consumer spending in the country,” he said, adding that “this indicates that Filipinos continue to apportion a fraction of their disposable incomes to restaurants, hotels and other leisure-related activities.”