Office and BPO market

Offices are why many of the residential towers exist, and they are a separate asset. A floor in Makati, Bonifacio Global City, Ortigas, the Bay Area, Alabang, a Quezon City centre or either of the Cebu parks is not a substitute for a floor in another. The lease, the parking, the night shift and the flood path differ. The city briefs hold the streets.

A retail podium follows the office. Mall rents and office rents clear on different leases. Industrial property sits somewhere else again: factories and warehouses south of Manila in Cavite and Laguna, the former bases at Clark and Subic, and the export estates on Mactan. Those pull housing because the plants are already operating. The infrastructure section is where a project still on paper is separated from one that is.

A building registered with the Philippine Economic Zone Authority is a fiscal file under the ecozone law, later reformed by the CREATE Act. Who works in those buildings, and what happens when a contract moves, is the BPO section. Registration says nothing reliable about the flood path or the resale of the condominium next door. A central-business-district tower answers to a corporate lease and a city hall.

Vacancy is a building fact. An average across a district mixes tenants who do not share a lease. The recent structural break was a tenant that existed because of a licence. Philippine offshore gaming operators took office floors and residential units. Executive Order No. 74, issued in November 2024, banned those operations and required licensed operators to cease. PAGCOR then cancelled the licences. A building whose rent roll depended on that use has to be read as what it is allowed to be now. The same test applies to any single employer.

Commercial land under a mall, a hotel or a warehouse is generally not available to a foreign individual. The practical foreign interest is often a share in a building, a lease, or a condominium unit used as an office. That file is separate from the residential condominium, even when the podium and the apartments share a lobby.

Business-process and IT-enabled services are a structural employer in Metro Manila, in Cebu, at Clark and, on a smaller scale, in Davao, Iloilo and a handful of other university cities. The industry’s own body is the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines. The work is done in English, often on shifts that do not match a daytime office. Buildings near those campuses stay relevant at midnight. A description written for a nine-to-five household will miss the person who actually sleeps there.

Customer contact, higher-skilled outsourcing, healthcare information, animation and corporate shared-service centres hire different people and house them differently. Banks, law firms and a thinner technology layer sit beside this, mostly in Makati, Bonifacio Global City and Ortigas, on a different payroll from a contact-centre campus. A campus can add seats, pause, or move a floor to another city when a contract moves. Housing demand moves with that decision.

Many of these floors sit in buildings registered as information-technology parks or centres with the Philippine Economic Zone Authority. That is a fiscal status under the ecozone law, as reformed by the CREATE Act. The night-time commute, and the condominium that advertises walking distance, are separate facts. The office section keeps the zone building and the corporate lease apart. This section is only the employer.

The industry treats automation, and the shift into higher-value work, as its own strategic question. That is a reason to read what a particular campus does. It does not produce a national vacancy figure, and a night-shift worker is not automatically an expatriate tenant. Hospitals, retail, government and manufacturing sit in the same cities. Leave them out and the employment picture is incomplete.