28/05/2026
Something to keep in mind when buying/investing in properties: what feels expensive today may look cheap years from now.
In 1977 Ayala Land launched the first lots in Ayala Alabang Village at 240 pesos per square meter.
At that price a 1,000 square meter lot cost 240,000 pesos. A significant sum in 1977 but within reach of a professional couple, a successful small business owner, or a mid-career executive willing to commit to what was then widely considered a geographic gamble. Alabang was not just far from Manila in 1977. It was psychologically far. The South Luzon Expressway was incomplete. The area was dominated by farmland, sugarcane fields, and the kind of provincial quiet that made Metro Manila professionals question whether buying there was ambition or folly.
Most people passed.
A specific group of people did not.
That same 1,000 square meter lot purchased at 240 pesos per square meter in 1977 for 240,000 pesos is today valued at approximately 200,000 to 250,000 pesos per square meter according to verified 2025 Leechiu Property Consultants and JPatag Real Estate data. That is a current market value of approximately 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 pesos.
From 240,000 pesos to 200,000,000 pesos in 48 years.
That is an appreciation of approximately 833 times the original purchase price. An annualized return of approximately 16% per year sustained across nearly five decades without a single active management decision required beyond the original purchase and the subsequent refusal to sell.
No stock market investment in Philippine history has matched that return on a single asset held passively across the same period. No bond. No business. No cryptocurrency. A piece of land in Alabang purchased when Alabang was considered too far from everywhere worth being.
But the more analytically important question is not what the return was.
It is who made it and why.
The families who bought in Ayala Alabang in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not primarily real estate speculators. They were professionals and entrepreneurs who made one decision that was at odds with the conventional wisdom of their social circle and held that decision with enough conviction to ignore every subsequent opportunity to exit. They were doctors and lawyers who bought lots at 800 to 1,200 pesos per square meter in the early 1980s when prices had already risen from the 1977 launch and everyone around them said they had missed the opportunity. They were business owners who bought in the mid-1980s during the Aquino political crisis when property markets were soft, confidence was shaken, and the path of least resistance was to wait for certainty that never fully arrived.
Every entry point that felt expensive at the time looks incomprehensibly cheap today.
The 1977 buyer paid 240 pesos per square meter and thought they were being bold.
The 1983 buyer paid approximately 2,000 to 3,000 pesos per square meter and thought they were paying a premium.
The 1995 buyer paid approximately 15,000 to 20,000 pesos per square meter and was told by their banker they were overpaying for a southern address.
The 2003 buyer paid approximately 18,000 to 22,000 pesos per square meter when Philstar reported the village had already appreciated 83 times from its 1977 launch price.
Every single one of them was right. Every single one of them made money that their peers who waited for a better entry point never made. Because the better entry point never came. It never comes. The chart of Ayala Alabang land prices across 48 years is a straight line pointing up with occasional flattening during crises that resolved within two to three years and resumed their trajectory as if the interruption never happened.
The pattern is not unique to Ayala Alabang.
It is the pattern of every premium master-planned residential community that Ayala Land has ever developed in the Philippines. Greenbelt. BGC. Nuvali. Anvaya. Mirala. The entry price always felt high at the time. The holding price always looks obvious in retrospect. The families who held without selling across multiple political cycles, multiple economic crises, and multiple moments of genuine uncertainty are the families whose net worth statements today reflect a number they could not have produced through any other asset class at any comparable risk level.
Here is the forward implication that every serious investor reading this should be thinking about right now.
Ayala Land currently has active master-planned developments in Arca South in Taguig, Evo City in Kawit Cavite, and the Bulacan Aerotropolis corridor adjacent to the New Manila International Airport currently under construction. Each of these addresses is today where Alabang was in 1977. Far from the established center. Dismissed by the conventional wisdom as either premature or overpriced for their current state of development. Surrounded by the same combination of skepticism and indifference that surrounded every address that subsequently produced generational wealth for the families who bought early and held without selling.
The 240 pesos per square meter moment of 2026 is not in Alabang.
It is in the address that most people are currently dismissing as too far, too early, or too expensive for what it is right now.
That address exists. It is being priced and sold today. And the families who identify it correctly and hold it with the same conviction that the Alabang buyers of 1977 held their decision will be writing this exact same post about a completely different address in 2074.
The land that makes families wealthy in the Philippines has never been the land that everyone agreed was worth buying.
It has always been the land that everyone agreed was not worth buying yet.
