MANILA – Vista Land & Lifescapes, Inc., one of the country’s leading integrated property developers and the largest homebuilder, remains optimistic on its residential and leasing businesses despite the pandemic, as it aims to roll out more projects this year.
In a statement, Vista Land chairman Manuel Villar Jr. said the coronavirus pandemic has impacted the company’s performance for the first half of 2020 and they still expect the rest of the year to be challenging.
Villar said the company however sees “encouraging signs” for both the residential and leasing businesses.
“We have witnessed that shift of customer preference to house and lot products in the provincial areas as evidenced by the increase in proportionate sales coming from our housing products outside Mega Manila compared to the same period last year,” he added.
For the leasing business, Villar said its operational gross floor area (GFA) has increased from 20 percent during enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) to 79 percent at present.
“The 21 percent that remain closed are those tenants that are still not allowed to operate as per government mandated restrictions,” he said.
The company has only launched two residential projects with a value of about PHP2 billion during the first half of the year but is looking at launching more especially if the upward trend in sales will continue.
Vista Land president and chief executive officer Manuel Paolo Villar said June sales were already at 70 percent of pre-coronavirus disease (Covid-19) level, with July and August sales tracking better than June.
“Thus, if this sales trajectory continues, we might decide to launch more projects in the fourth quarter. We do not need to acquire new land anyway as we have an existing land bank of about 3,000 hectares. We are also happy that because of the synergy between our residential and leasing businesses, our malls are still enjoying a decent foot traffic since most of our commercial properties are within our existing residential community,” he said.
Villar said they are making the necessary adjustments to their business operations to better position the company once the economy fully recovers.
“This pandemic may have upended the real estate industry and the economy in general yet a lot of opportunities are still there especially in our sector,” he added. (PR)
