Manila Times
January 13, 2010
The country’s largest property firm will develop another high-end residential project in its mixed-use eco-community in Santa Rosa and Calamba, Laguna.
In a briefing, Antonio Aquino, Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) president, said the company will invest P1.5 billion to develop Santierra, which is adjacent to its 1,750-hectare commercial and residential district, NUVALI.
Aquino said the project, which is under AyalaLand Premier, consists of two parcels with a combined area of approximately 70 hectares. Half of the total land area would be used for residences and the rest would be devoted to open spaces and roads.
Santierra has four lot classifications: the Prime, which has a minimum price tag of P11,495 per square meter; the Parklane at P11,834 per square meter; Park Estate at P12,386 per square meter; and the Ridge Estate at P14,259 per square meter.
Aquino said that the property sector in 2010 would fully recover from the slump of the past two years because of the global downturn.
Because of that, ALI would launch more projects and introduce a new residential brand called Amamia.
The company said it would also build five small shopping centers this year to address the growing demand from middle-income consumers in a bid to capture a wider market.
Alfonso Javier Reyes, ALI investor communications and compliance head, said these shopping centers would be under the newly formed unit, Primavera Town Centre Inc., which focuses on small-format retail facilities.
These “neighborhood centers” will be located in Makati, Bonifacio Global City, NUVALI and other potential growth centers of ALI in Luzon.
Reyes said the new entity will handle the planning, development and management of neighborhood centers within the company’s existing and planned growth centers across the country.
“Neighborhood centers will offer a convenient shopping and lifestyle experience to the immediate mixed-use communities in these growth centers and will have a maximum size of 10,000 square meters of gross leasable area,” he said.
ALI intends to infuse an initial P320 million into the new unit to finance the five projects in the pipeline. The real estate firm also plans to build another three to six neighborhood centers in the next four years.
Jaime Ysmael, ALI’s chief finance officer, earlier said the development of small shopping centers is part of its plan to shift from high-end to middle-income consumers.
“[These are] smaller malls and most of them will be integrated in our developments. We’ll have provincial play, but mostly in Metro or Mega Manila,” he said.
“We started as a high-end, but we’ve broadened [it] to cover middle-income. We would like to broaden that further to address a bigger market,” he added.
|
