The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Luis Leoncio
Top property developer Megaworld Corp. is ramping up its investments in the next three years, as it expects the current property boom to last beyond President Aquino’s term, which ends next year.
Megaworld has accelerated the setting up of its six campus-type office towers in the 34.5-hectare McKinley West township in the southern part of Fort Bonifacio, beside upscale Forbes Park. The development of the area will be part of the property giant’s 350,000 square-meter office-space expansion in the Fort in the next three years.
“We are currently experiencing an overwhelming demand for office spaces in our various townships, mostly in Fort Bonifacio. In McKinley West, the demand is focused on campus type buildings that have higher efficiency floor plates, easy access to office floors via internal staircases and branding rights for whole building occupiers,” Megaworld Senior Vice President Jericho Go said.
The six office towers are named One West Campus, Two West Campus Three West Campus, Five West Campus, Six West Campus and Eight West Campus; each tower’s ground level would be devoted to commercial establishments.
“We are optimistic we will be able to reach 1 million square meters of leasable office spaces even before 2018,” Go said. “Megaworld continues to attract more locators to set up or expand their businesses in the Philippines, especially after we built 8 Campus Place in McKinley Hill, which is the first LEED gold-certified BPO (business-process outsourcing) office building in the country. We look forward to our LEED certification for the new office towers in McKinley West, as well.”
LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environment Design of the US Green Building Council.
Earlier, the company announced it was allocating P20 billion for the expansion of its office portfolio in Fort Bonifacio until 2018.
Megaworld is the largest developer and lessor of office spaces in the country today, with over 700,000 square meters of office space inventory; around 300,000 sq. m. of the inventory are in Fort Bonifacio, particularly in McKinley Hill.
The world’s top information-technology (IT) and BPO companies are among its biggest office client. They include Accenture, HP, Wells Fargo, United Health Group, IBM and Thomson Reuters.
President Aquino recently declared McKinley West a “special economic zone” for IT under the jurisdiction of the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza).
So-called special economic zones are granted certain state privileges, such as income-tax holidays, duty-free importation of capital equipment and other non-fiscal incentives. Megaworld’s six office towers could generate around 20,000 jobs once completed.
Megaworld will also build nine more malls within its townships over the next five years as part of its plan to open 20 new malls in the country by 2020.
Tefel Pesigan-Valentino, senior assistant vice president of Megaworld Lifestyle Malls, said the malls will be located in the company’s different townships, including those in Iloilo, Cebu, Davao and Pampanga.
The company has already built lifestyle destinations in Eastwood City, Quezon City; Binondo, Manila; Pasay City; Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City; Iloilo City; Mactan, Cebu; and Davao.
“We have a target of 20 malls or 20 townships by 2020 not just in Manila but also outside Metro Manila,” she also said on the sidelines of the opening of Silver Bucket Seafood Dining in Tagaytay Twin Lakes, the country’s first and only vineyard resort community.
Pesigan-Valentino said the lifestyle malls are focused on upper-segment market.
Pesigan-Valentino said the Tagaytay Twin Lakes will have about 20 dining and retail tenants.
Apart from Silver Bucket Seafood Dining, others that recently opened their stores at Twin Lakes were Santis Delicatessen, Bag of Beans and Starbucks.
The 1,200-hectare Tagaytay Twin Lakes is a multiphase master-planned development comprising themed residential villages, condominiums, plantation estates, and lakeshore and retirement communities.