ALI spins off new unit to focus on upper middle class house buyers

Banking on a recovery in the real estate sector, property giant Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) has spun off a wholly-owned subsidiary, Community Innovations Inc. (CII), as part of a niche marketing strategy aimed at the upper-middle class segment.

In a press briefing yesterday, ALI president Francisco Licuanan III said the new company, capitalized at P500 million, will target young executives, entrepreneurs and start-up families at lower costs than the average ALI residential condominium or townhouse development.

"We hope to address the gap between the middle-income market serviced by our other subsidiary Laguna Properties Holdings Inc. and the high-end segment offered by ALI," he said.

CII president Angela Lacson said they intend to tap a market estimated at 22,000 households in Metro Manila over the next three years.

The CII line will include integrated residential subdivisions with packages for house-and-lot or lots only, townhouse clusters and condominiums. Their sites will be situated within the greater Manila area, which include parts of Rizal and Laguna, all designed with affordability, security, and accessibility features.

For their first project, CII will be launching the 25-hectare Verdana Homes, a residential subdivision located along the border of Las Piñas and Bacoor, Cavite. A showcase of California architecture and community planning, the site is seven kilometers from the upscale Ayala Alabang Communtiy which ALI established in the 80s.

The project will take two years to develop but CII will start pre-selling the units as soon as they are given the license to sell by the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board in about two to three weeks’ time.

There are a total of 291 units for the first phase, out of which 50 are for house-and-lot packages and the rest for lots only. Jonathan Umali, CII product development manager, said the lot buyers can establish their own housing units on their own, although these will have to conform to CII’s standards.

The lot prices begin at P1.5 million while house and lot models go from P3.7 million to P6.6 million. The lots range in size from 200 sqm to 398 sqm.

As part of the affordability feature, the project comes with in-house financing options with amortizations for as low as P30,000 a month for house-and-lot and P11,000 monthly for lots, over a span of five to 20 years.

CII will be turning over the completed units by December 2003, coinciding with the launching of the projects’s second phase with almost the same number of units.

Lacson said they expect to start negotiations for their second project — a condominium building — within Metro Manila.