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Metro Manila's Condo Glut, and What 83,000 Empty Units Mean for the Diaspora

3 hours ago
3 min read

Metro Manila's unsold condo inventory just hit a record high: 82,900 units, according to Leechiu Property Consultants, the most it has ever tracked. At the current sales pace, LPC estimates it would take about 34 months to absorb that backlog — nearly three years, against a historical average of roughly 12 months. The number has crept up slowly rather than crashed; it stood at 82,500 units in 2025, so the glut hasn't gotten dramatically worse, but it hasn't meaningfully cleared either, even as developers slow new launches and buyers trickle back.


Colliers Philippines tracks a related but distinct figure: vacancy, the share of already-completed units sitting empty. That rate was 23.9% in 2024, climbed to 24.7% by the end of 2025, and is projected to peak near 25% this year before easing back toward 23.9% in 2027. Put plainly, roughly one in four Metro Manila condos is standing empty right now. Separately, Colliers counted about 30,400 unsold ready-for-occupancy units as of Q3 2025, concentrated in Quezon City, Manila, Pasay–Parañaque, and Pasig — the outer-core districts where mid- and lower-mid-income projects cluster. Makati, Bonifacio Global City, Ortigas, and Rockwell have held up better, though even there, price growth has flattened.


How did the market get here? Mostly, it built for a boom that didn't last. Developers launched aggressively from 2017 through 2019, averaging close to 14,000 completed units a year, betting that demand — fueled by business process outsourcing jobs, overseas remittances, and a wave of offshore gaming operators moving in from China — would keep climbing indefinitely. Then two things happened close together. The pandemic hit in 2020, stalling construction and, more lastingly, changing how and where people wanted to live; office-adjacent studio units lost their appeal as remote work spread. And in 2024, the Philippine government banned Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, or POGOs, outright. Thousands of workers who had filled Manila's Bay Area towers left within months, and rents in that submarket have fallen the hardest of anywhere in the metro: down 59% to about ₱706 per square meter, according to LPC's rental tracking. Alabang and Muntinlupa fell 42%, Ortigas and Mandaluyong 25%, and even resilient Makati is down 18%. Only Bonifacio Global City and Taguig posted gains, and barely — up 0.1% and 15% respectively, off a much smaller, already-stabilized base.


The upside, if there is one, belongs to buyers. Colliers research director Joey Bondoc has pointed to weak economic growth and high mortgage rates as the main drag on purchasing power, and developers have responded by cutting launch volumes and loosening payment terms to move what's already built — particularly the mid-range units that have been sitting longest. Metro Manila's average condo price sat around ₱4.72 million as of Q3 2025, and even luxury three-bedroom units in the core business districts posted their third straight quarterly price drop, down about 2% year-on-year. Moby Arquiza of the ASEAN Real Estate Network Alliance has argued the deeper fix is political, not just financial, saying plainly that the government "should first fix itself" before the sector can fully recover — a frustration echoed by brokers watching negotiable prices sit next to stalled infrastructure promises.


None of this is abstract for the Filipino diaspora. A condo back home has long functioned as more than real estate — it's often treated as proof that years of working abroad meant something, a tangible marker handed back to family, a retirement plan, a foothold kept open in case of return. That instinct isn't wrong. But buying into a market carrying three years of unsold inventory is a different decision than buying into one with none, and it deserves the same scrutiny anyone would give a major purchase: which submarket actually has resilient demand, what a developer's payment terms really commit you to, and whether the unit is one you'd actually want to live in or rent out, not just one priced to move inventory off someone else's books.


That's the root of it, literally — ugat means root. A home should be something that holds you, not something that sits waiting, half-finished or half-sold, for the market to catch up to what you already paid for. If you're planning to buy back home, know these numbers first. Ask where the demand actually is, not just where the units are cheapest. And don't let a sales pitch move faster than your own due diligence.


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