
Get all the data you need about the real estate market in Manila
SUMMARY
Mostly no. Metro Manila rents are not broadly rising anymore: the market is better described as flat, fragmented and still weighed down by condominium oversupply.
The strongest exception is BGC. Its rents have essentially recovered to their pre-pandemic level, while wider Taguig is above it; Makati, Ortigas, Alabang and especially the Bay Area remain materially below their earlier benchmarks.
That split makes a single “Manila rent” number unusually misleading. A tenant searching in BGC or Rockwell can still face tight, expensive conditions while someone in Pasay can choose among large numbers of competing units and negotiate.
High portal asking rents can also exaggerate landlord strength. Premium-heavy brokerage inventories often show very expensive one-bedroom averages, while smaller listing datasets show flat or falling medians, and neither necessarily captures the discount ultimately written into a lease.
The POGO shutdown changed the Bay Area more than a normal downturn would have. Vacancy moved above 50%, removing pricing power from landlords in a district whose rental market had been built around a concentrated tenant base.
Metro Manila's unsold condo stock matters directly to renters because more than 30,000 units are already ready for occupancy. An unsold preselling unit cannot compete with a landlord today; an empty completed condo can.
The recovery in condo sales is therefore not the same thing as a recovery in rents. Buyers are responding to discounts, payment terms and RFO promotions while rental yields remain compressed and landlords still compete against abundant existing stock.
Inflation is another misleading indicator. Household expenses and landlord operating costs can rise quickly even when the base rent barely moves, so a more expensive Manila does not automatically mean a stronger rental market.
Rent control explains part of the story only at the low end. Most BGC, Makati and Ortigas condos sit far above the regulated threshold, so weak rent growth there comes mainly from vacancy, competition and negotiation rather than government ceilings.
The next rental upswing is more likely to begin locally than citywide. BGC, Rockwell and other low-vacancy employment centers look best positioned to tighten first, but Metro Manila still needs to absorb a very large inventory overhang before broad rent inflation becomes convincing.
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Are rents in Manila still rising?
The short answer is: mostly no. Metro Manila is no longer experiencing a broad rental upswing. The clearest institutional data now points to flat or declining condominium rents across much of the capital, with Bonifacio Global City and parts of Taguig standing out as important exceptions. The market has split sharply: tenants still compete for well-located units in the strongest business districts, while landlords in the Bay Area and several oversupplied submarkets are dealing with vacancies, abundant alternatives and rents that remain far below their pre-pandemic peaks.
The catch is that “Manila rents” can describe very different markets. A corporate tenant looking for a furnished one-bedroom condominium in BGC is operating in a different rental economy from someone searching around Pasay, Mandaluyong or the City of Manila. Asking rents can also look surprisingly firm even while landlords accept discounts or concessions. We therefore need to separate the headline market from the neighborhoods where rents genuinely are still rising.
Are Manila rents actually rising right now?
No, Metro Manila rents are not broadly rising right now. The best evidence we found points instead to a market that has moved from post-pandemic recovery into stagnation and, in several districts, outright correction.
Leechiu Property Consultants reported in its first-half residential assessment that rental rates in most Metro Manila business districts remained below their pre-pandemic levels. Makati rents were about 18% below that benchmark, Ortigas/Mandaluyong 25% below it, Alabang/Muntinlupa 42% below and the Bay Area 59% below. BGC was essentially the exception, edging about 0.1% above its earlier level, while the broader Taguig market was up around 15%.
Colliers reaches essentially the same current conclusion from another dataset. After expecting a roughly 1.2% residential-rent correction during 2025, its Q1 2026 outlook shifted to flat lease rates for 2026 rather than a meaningful rebound.
So the market is not crashing across the board, but it is hard to describe today's conditions as a general rental upswing.
| Metro Manila submarket | Change versus pre-pandemic level | Approx. current rent | Current direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| BGC | +0.1% | ₱1,105/sqm | Essentially flat |
| Wider Taguig | +15% | ₱715/sqm | Up |
| Makati | -18% | ₱887/sqm | Below old peak |
| Ortigas/Mandaluyong | -25% | ₱729/sqm | Weak |
| Alabang/Muntinlupa | -42% | ₱715/sqm | Weak |
| Bay Area/Pasay | -59% | ₱706/sqm | Very weak |
Why does it sometimes look like Manila rents are still going up?
Manila rents can look stronger than they really are because the properties people notice most are disproportionately located in expensive, resilient districts such as BGC, Rockwell and central Makati.
Current listing portals illustrate the problem. Dot Property shows a Metro Manila condominium median asking rent of roughly ₱60,000, while Makati and BGC are considerably more expensive. HousingInteractive's Makati listings average about ₱54,000 for one-bedroom units, while its small current BGC sample averages roughly ₱48,000 for one-bedroom units. Hoppler's Makati inventory averages about ₱64,600 for one-bedroom condos.
These figures are not transaction indices. They mix buildings of different ages, sizes and quality, and some portals are heavily weighted toward premium inventory. They are useful for understanding what tenants currently see online, but not for proving that the same apartment costs more than it did a year earlier.
A smaller live-listing dataset makes the distinction especially clear. Filipino Homes currently shows a Metro Manila condominium median around ₱25,000, flat over the latest month and about 7% lower over three months. Its Makati median is also flat month to month, while its one-bedroom median has slipped from about ₱30,000 to ₱27,000 over three months.
High advertised prices and rising market rents are simply not the same thing.
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Did Manila rents recover after the pandemic and then stall?
Yes. Metro Manila rents initially recovered after the pandemic, but that recovery has since run into much heavier supply and weaker tenant demand.
Colliers was still describing an improving residential-leasing environment in 2023, helped by expatriates returning to Makati CBD, Rockwell, Ortigas and Fort Bonifacio. In early 2024, it expected rents to increase by roughly 1% for the year, a modest gain rather than a boom.
The picture then deteriorated. Residential vacancy jumped after the Philippine offshore gaming industry was dismantled, while large numbers of completed condominiums continued entering the leasing pool. By late 2025, Colliers was forecasting a rental correction rather than continued growth. Its latest 2026 assessment now expects rents to remain broadly flat.
In practice, the cycle has had three phases: pandemic decline, partial recovery, then another period of oversupply-driven stagnation. Saying that “Manila rents are still rising” confuses the middle phase with the market we have now.
How much did the POGO ban change Manila's rental market?
The POGO ban fundamentally changed parts of Manila's rental market, especially the Bay Area, because it removed a tenant base that had previously been willing to absorb large numbers of nearby condominium units.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordered Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators to cease operations, and all licensed operators were required to wind down by the end of 2024. The residential consequences became visible almost immediately.
Colliers recorded Bay Area condominium vacancy jumping from 27.5% in the third quarter of 2024 to 52% by year-end. By the second quarter of 2025, vacancy had reached approximately 54%. A year later, Leechiu was still finding Bay Area rents roughly 59% below their pre-pandemic level.
The price comparison is even more striking at the unit level. Colliers reported that Bay Area studio apartments that could achieve around ₱1,200 per square meter before 2020 were renting for only about ₱700 per square meter in 2025. That is a drop of roughly 42%.
This was not a normal cyclical slowdown. A concentrated source of tenants disappeared from a district that had built substantial housing supply around them.
| Bay Area indicator | Earlier level | Later level | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential vacancy | 27.5% in Q3 2024 | 52.0% at end-2024 | +24.5 percentage points |
| Vacancy after further adjustment | 52.0% | ~54% in Q2 2025 | Still worsening |
| Typical studio rent | ~₱1,200/sqm pre-2020 | ~₱700/sqm in 2025 | About -42% |
| Rent versus pre-pandemic benchmark | 100 | ~41 | About -59% |
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Is BGC still one of the few places where rents can rise?
Yes. BGC is currently the clearest counterexample to the weak Metro Manila rental story, although even there the evidence suggests resilience more than another explosive rise.
Leechiu's latest comparison puts BGC rental rates around ₱1,105 per square meter, essentially back to or slightly above their pre-pandemic level. That makes BGC unusual among Manila's major business districts. Wider Taguig has performed even better in percentage terms, with rental rates about 15% above the earlier benchmark.
Current asking rents confirm that tenants still pay a substantial location premium. BGC studios commonly appear around ₱28,000–₱45,000 per month, with many one-bedroom units in the ₱45,000–₱75,000 range. Dot Property's broader BGC condominium dataset produces a median asking rent of about ₱88,000 because it contains considerable larger and premium inventory.
The support is structural rather than speculative. BGC combines high-quality office stock, multinational employers, international schools, retail, restaurants and a relatively walkable environment. It also escaped the direct POGO shock that devastated the Bay Area.
But BGC's approximately 0.1% increase over the old benchmark is telling. The strongest major submarket is holding up, not producing evidence of runaway rent inflation.
Is Makati still getting more expensive for renters?
Not in aggregate. Makati remains expensive, but expensive should not be confused with rising.
Leechiu currently puts average Makati residential rents at approximately ₱887 per square meter, around 18% below their pre-pandemic level. That is far stronger than the Bay Area but still inconsistent with the idea of an uninterrupted rental boom.
Asking rents nevertheless remain high because Makati contains several very different submarkets. HousingInteractive's current inventory averages roughly ₱54,500 per month for a one-bedroom condo and ₱107,000 for a two-bedroom. Hoppler puts its one-bedroom average around ₱64,600, with average rents across all unit sizes close to ₱100,000 in Salcedo Village and about ₱127,000 in Rockwell.
A smaller Filipino Homes sample, however, produces a Makati median of only around ₱27,000 and shows one-bedroom asking rents down roughly 10% over three months.
The gap between those numbers is the point. A Makati “average” depends heavily on which towers a portal tracks. Rockwell, Salcedo, Legazpi, Poblacion and fringe Makati should not be treated as interchangeable.
| Current Makati indicator | Approximate level | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Leechiu market rent | ₱887/sqm | Still below pre-pandemic level |
| HousingInteractive 1BR average | ₱54,460/month | Premium-heavy asking inventory |
| Hoppler 1BR average | ₱64,640/month | Premium brokerage inventory |
| Filipino Homes median | ₱27,000/month | Smaller, lower-priced sample |
| Leechiu change vs pre-pandemic | -18% | Long-term recovery incomplete |
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Is Ortigas quietly outperforming weaker parts of Manila?
Ortigas is more resilient than the Bay Area, but it is not currently a strong rent-growth story.
Leechiu estimates rents in the Ortigas/Mandaluyong area around ₱729 per square meter, roughly 25% below the pre-pandemic benchmark. That leaves the market materially cheaper than its earlier peak despite the district's established office base and central location.
What Ortigas does have is relatively healthy occupancy. During 2025, Colliers reported vacancy below 15% in Ortigas Center, substantially better than the roughly 25% Metro Manila average and dramatically below the Bay Area.
Reasonable occupancy with rents still below old levels suggests landlords are finding tenants without having enough pricing power yet to push rents sharply higher.
It is a stabilization story rather than a boom.
Has the Bay Area become a renter's market?
Yes. Among Manila's major condominium clusters, the Bay Area remains the clearest renter's market today.
When vacancy exceeds 50%, landlords are no longer competing only on location. They are competing against hundreds or thousands of alternative units in similar towers. Tenants can compare furnishings, views, parking, association dues and lease flexibility before negotiating price.
The structural problem is larger than the POGO departures themselves. Unsold ready-for-occupancy units also feed potential rental supply. In 2025, Colliers estimated that the Bay Area, Makati fringe, Pasig and Manila together accounted for 35% of Metro Manila's unsold RFO inventory.
Even if tenant demand gradually improves, a landlord in the Bay Area must first compete through a large stock of vacant and investor-owned units. That makes rapid rent increases difficult.
For renters who do not need to live in BGC or central Makati, this is currently one of the strongest sources of negotiating leverage in Metro Manila.
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Is Manila's condo oversupply still large enough to hold rents down?
Yes. Metro Manila's condominium oversupply remains large enough to place a meaningful ceiling on rent growth.
Leechiu counted a record 82,900 unsold condominium units in the second quarter of 2026 across 616 actively selling projects. At prevailing sales rates, that represented about 34 months of inventory, almost three times the consultancy's historical norm of roughly 12 months.
Colliers measures inventory differently and therefore produces different absolute figures, but reaches the same conclusion. It entered 2026 with roughly 79,200 unsold units and more than 30,000 unsold ready-for-occupancy condos.
Those RFO units matter disproportionately for rents. A preselling apartment due years from now cannot compete with today's landlord. An empty completed condo can. Owners who cannot sell may rent the unit, developers can offer rent-to-own alternatives, and investors trying to cover carrying costs compete with existing landlords.
So better condominium sales do not automatically translate into rising rents.
| Supply indicator | Recent level | Historical/contextual comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Leechiu unsold inventory | 82,900 units | Record high in its dataset |
| Active projects | 616 | Very broad inventory base |
| Months of supply | ~34 months | Historical norm around 12 months |
| Colliers unsold inventory entering 2026 | ~79,200 units | Still exceptionally high |
| Unsold RFO stock | 30,000+ units | Direct potential competition for landlords |
But isn't condo demand recovering in Manila?
Yes, condominium demand is recovering, but today's improvement is much stronger in property sales than in rents.
Leechiu recorded 7,732 Metro Manila condominium units taken up in the first quarter of 2026, 19% more than a year earlier. Second-quarter take-up remained substantial at 7,255 units. Across the first half, approximately 14,500 units were absorbed, around 6% more than in the comparable period.
Colliers also detected a sharp rebound in preselling activity, particularly in economic and affordable housing.
But much of this demand comes from end-users responding to discounts, flexible payment plans and ready-for-occupancy promotions. It is not necessarily investor demand created by stronger rental economics.
Leechiu estimates rental yields at only about 3.8% for primary units and 4.6% in the secondary market. With rents soft and property prices still relatively elevated, buying a condo purely because rents are supposedly surging is difficult to justify.
The sales recovery could eventually tighten leasing supply. It has not done so yet.
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Are Manila landlords still able to raise rents simply because inflation is high?
Not automatically. Manila's broader cost of living has been rising faster than condominium rents, which is another sign that landlords currently lack strong pricing power.
NCR inflation has recently been running above 4%, with housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels rising considerably faster. But that CPI category is much broader than market condominium rents: electricity and utilities can drive it upward even when landlords leave contractual rent unchanged.
A renter can therefore experience a sharply higher cost of living without paying a higher base rent.
For landlords, the implication is uncomfortable. Maintenance, repairs, association charges and other operating expenses can rise while the market prevents them from passing the full increase to tenants.
So inflation does not prove that residential rents are rising. In some cases, real, inflation-adjusted rents are falling even when nominal rents appear stable.
Does rent control explain why cheaper Manila rents are not rising faster?
Partly, but only at the low end of the market. Rent control cannot explain the weakness in typical Makati, BGC or Ortigas condominiums because most of those units are far above the statutory threshold.
Under the National Human Settlements Board rules covering 2025–2026, qualifying residential units rented for up to ₱10,000 per month in Metro Manila remain protected by rent regulation when occupied by the same tenant. The permitted annual increase is 1%.
The government estimated from the 2023 Family Income and Expenditure Survey that almost 95% of renting families nationwide paid ₱10,000 or less, showing how relevant rent regulation remains to the mass market.
But a ₱50,000 BGC condominium or ₱60,000 Makati one-bedroom is outside that controlled segment. Rents there are determined much more directly by competition, vacancy and lease negotiations.
In practice, Metro Manila has two rental markets: regulated low-cost housing where increases are administratively constrained, and market-rate condos where excess supply is doing much of the constraining.
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Are landlords cutting advertised rent, or just negotiating privately?
Both happen, but private negotiation probably makes the rental market softer than headline listing data suggests.
Property portals measure asking prices. They do not consistently capture the final rent written into the lease, free weeks, included parking, absorbed association dues or owners accepting several thousand pesos below asking after a unit sits vacant.
This becomes especially important when vacancy is high. A landlord asking ₱35,000 and accepting ₱32,000 has technically not changed the advertised market if the portal continues to show ₱35,000. Add free association dues or a parking slot and the effective rent falls further.
The heavy use of promotions on the sales side gives us additional evidence about the broader competitive environment. Colliers has documented developers offering large RFO discounts, extended terms and rent-to-own arrangements because inventory remains difficult to clear.
Stable asking rents are therefore better treated as an upper-bound indication of pricing power than as proof that achieved rents are stable.
Are smaller apartments still easier to rent than large ones?
Usually yes, but location now matters at least as much as unit size.
A one-bedroom unit in BGC can attract professionals who want to live close to work and can afford the premium. Small condos in Makati similarly benefit from a deep employment base. In weaker districts, however, simply being a studio no longer guarantees fast absorption because many owners are competing for the same renter.
Large premium apartments operate differently. Their tenant pool is smaller, but expatriate executives, diplomatic households and corporate leases can support rents in buildings with the right location and quality.
Colliers has specifically highlighted continuing expatriate interest in larger units and more open living spaces, particularly in established CBDs. That helps explain why some prime buildings can remain resilient while thousands of generic investor studios elsewhere struggle.
The dividing line now is less about size and more about scarcity. Differentiated housing behaves very differently from interchangeable housing.
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Could stronger office demand start pushing residential rents higher again?
Yes, but it has not yet been strong enough to overturn the rental oversupply.
Metro Manila's office market improved materially during 2025. Colliers recorded approximately 309,000 square meters of net office take-up, its strongest result since 2020, while office vacancy fell to 19.4%. Fort Bonifacio, the Bay Area and Quezon City together accounted for roughly half of transactions.
Return-to-office behavior is also firmer. A Colliers survey found 57% of respondents working fully onsite, compared with 54% in an earlier survey. More employees physically returning to Makati, BGC, Ortigas and other employment centers should gradually increase the value of living nearby.
The mismatch is telling: office recovery has occurred faster than residential rent recovery. Supply is still dominating the condo market.
If office employment keeps growing while condominium completions fall, this imbalance can eventually reverse. For now, the new tenant demand is being absorbed without broad rent inflation.
Is the supply wave finally close to ending?
Supply should become less aggressive later, but renters will not feel the effect immediately.
Colliers expects around 13,000 Metro Manila condominium units to complete during 2026, almost twice the previous year's volume. That means the near-term market still has another large batch of apartments to absorb.
The pipeline then becomes much thinner because developers drastically reduced new launches during the weak sales cycle. Earlier Colliers estimates pointed to only a few thousand annual completions once the current backlog has been delivered, versus roughly 13,000 units per year during the peak development years from 2017 to 2019.
This is the strongest case for future rent recovery. Today's oversupply is partly the delayed result of projects launched years ago. Fewer starts today mean fewer completed rental units later.
But an 82,900-unit sales overhang and exceptionally high secondary-market vacancy do not disappear simply because future construction slows. The rental recovery should therefore be gradual and highly localized.
| Supply phase | Approximate scale | Likely rental effect |
|---|---|---|
| 2017–2019 peak completions | ~13,000 units/year | Rapid stock expansion |
| 2025 completions | ~8,000–9,000 units | Supply still substantial |
| 2026 expected completions | ~13,000 units | Near-term pressure remains |
| Later pipeline | Much lower annual completions | Gradually improves landlord position |
| Current unsold stock | 82,900 units by Leechiu | Delays broad rent recovery |
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Which Manila renters face the greatest risk of future rent increases?
Renters in BGC, Rockwell and other low-vacancy premium districts face the greatest risk of renewed increases because these are the places where supply-demand conditions are already closest to tightening.
BGC is particularly important. It combines resilient residential demand with one of Metro Manila's strongest office markets, relatively high expatriate exposure and limited substitutes offering the same walkable CBD environment. Its rents have already recovered roughly to their pre-pandemic benchmark while most major submarkets have not.
Makati CBD and Rockwell deserve similar attention. Their vacancy rates have remained well below Metro Manila's overall level, even though Makati-wide rents are still below their earlier peak. Once vacant stock is absorbed, landlords there will be in a much stronger position to raise rents than landlords in Pasay or the Bay Area.
Tenants choosing generic investor-heavy developments face less risk. Where dozens of similar furnished studios are simultaneously available, switching costs are low and landlords have difficulty forcing through increases.
The next Manila rental upswing, if it comes, is therefore likely to begin building by building and district by district rather than across the whole metropolitan area.
Could Manila rents start rising again soon?
Yes, but a broad Manila rental rebound still looks premature today.
Several conditions are moving in the right direction. Condominium take-up has improved, office activity has recovered, return-to-office patterns support CBD housing demand, and developers have curtailed future residential launches. Eventually, a smaller completion pipeline should reduce vacancy.
But the starting point is unusually loose. Colliers expects Metro Manila residential vacancy to remain around 25%–26%, while Leechiu still counts roughly 34 months of unsold inventory. The Bay Area remains severely oversupplied, and rental yields continue to be compressed.
For a genuine citywide rent cycle to begin, we would want to see several developments simultaneously: falling vacancy for multiple quarters, absorption of RFO inventory, rising achieved rather than merely advertised rents, and stronger rental growth spreading from BGC into Makati, Ortigas and secondary districts.
We are not there yet.
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So, are rents in Manila still rising?
Mostly no. Metro Manila rents are currently better described as flat, fragmented and still recovering from oversupply than as broadly rising.
The strongest evidence is difficult to reconcile with a citywide rent-boom narrative. Leechiu finds most major business districts below pre-pandemic rental levels. Colliers expects essentially flat condominium lease rates for 2026. Metro Manila still carries around 82,900 unsold units in Leechiu's inventory measure, residential vacancy remains exceptionally high, and the Bay Area is still dealing with the consequences of losing the POGO tenant base.
The exceptions are meaningful. BGC has essentially regained its earlier rental level, wider Taguig has moved above it, and premium low-vacancy buildings in BGC, Rockwell and central Makati can behave much more strongly than the metropolitan average. A renter targeting those areas should not assume that Manila's overall oversupply guarantees cheap housing.
But those pockets do not overturn the aggregate. Manila's post-pandemic rental recovery has stalled before becoming a broad new upswing. The next cycle may eventually begin in BGC and other supply-constrained districts, particularly as future condo completions slow. For the metropolitan market as a whole, however, rents are not still rising in any convincing or uniform sense.
Research basis: the central market conclusions above are grounded primarily in the latest residential reports from Leechiu Property Consultants and Colliers Philippines, including Leechiu's record 82,900-unit inventory figure and district rental comparisons, Colliers' vacancy and lease-rate forecasts, current portal asking-rent datasets, government POGO records, PSA inflation data and the current National Human Settlements Board rent-control resolution.
OUR METHODOLOGY
“Are rents in Manila still rising?” sounds like a simple question, but the evidence behind it does not all move in the same direction. We therefore broke the question into the dimensions that most directly show whether a genuine rental upswing is taking place: rental rates, vacancy, live asking rents, ready-for-occupancy supply, unsold condominium inventory, leasing demand and the performance of individual business districts.
We kept different kinds of evidence separate. Rental-rate and vacancy data were used to assess landlord pricing power; current listings were used to understand what tenants are actually seeing online; condominium inventory and RFO supply showed how much competing stock landlords face; and condominium sales, office demand and return-to-office trends were treated as supporting indicators of where future rental demand may strengthen.
No single statistic determined the answer. We gave greater weight to recent institutional market reports and official first-hand sources, while using portal data as market context rather than treating advertised rents as achieved rents. This is especially important in a high-vacancy market, where the final lease can include discounts, parking, association dues or other concessions that do not appear in the headline listing price.
We also analyzed major submarkets separately. BGC, Makati, Ortigas, the Bay Area and Alabang do not share the same vacancy, tenant base or supply conditions, so a single Metro Manila average can hide more than it reveals. The final diagnosis comes from looking for convergence across these local and metropolitan indicators while preserving the exceptions where the evidence clearly supports them.
For the historical comparison, pre-pandemic rental levels were used as a benchmark for how complete the recovery has actually been. That is a different question from whether an asking rent moved slightly over the latest month or quarter, and it helps distinguish genuinely recovered districts from markets that remain expensive but still below their previous peaks.
Key institutional sources used for the residential analysis include Leechiu Property Consultants' 1H 2026 residential market report, Leechiu's 1H 2026 Philippine Property Market report, Leechiu's Q1 2026 market report, Leechiu's Metro Manila condominium overhang analysis, Colliers Philippines' Q1 2026 Residential report, Colliers' Q4 2025 Residential report, Colliers' Q3 2025 Residential report, Colliers' Q4 2024 Residential report, and Colliers' Q2 2023 Residential report.
For supporting demand and policy context, we used Colliers' Q4 2025 Office report, Colliers' Q2 2025 office and residential survey, the Philippine Presidential Communications Office record of the POGO ban, Executive Order No. 74 in the Supreme Court E-Library, the Philippine Statistics Authority's CPI releases, and the National Human Settlements Board's 2025–2026 rent-control resolution.
Live asking-rent context came from Dot Property's Metro Manila condominium listings, Dot Property's BGC rental listings, Filipino Homes' Metro Manila condominium listings, and Filipino Homes' Makati rental listings. These listing datasets were used as a check on what renters encounter in the market, not as substitutes for rental transaction indices.
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