Phinma venturing into community housing in Davao, Bacolod

MANILA, Philippines — Phinma Corp., the listed diversified conglomerate of the Del Rosario Group, plans to venture into community housing this year, with initial projects eyed in Davao and Bacolod.

“We’re starting not so big. Our first project will be in Davao. The way we are organizing it is we’re calling it community housing. It’s not just physical homes. It’s building communities,” Phinma chairman and CEO Ramon del Rosario said.

“And the idea there is to put some of the basic necessities that families need, such as daycare center, skills upgrading facilities, even employment opportunities and stuff like that,” he said.

To test the concept, Del Rosario said the group is looking at putting up 200 units initially in Davao, with prices ranging between P750,000 and P800,000 per unit.

“We really want to make sure we know what we’re doing and that we can do it at scale and at a reasonable cost. Hopefully it would generate reasonable profits as well,” he said.

According to Del Rosario, the next community housing project eyed by the company would be in Bacolod.

“It was supposed to be in Iloilo actually, but the property that we acquired turned out to be not suitable because it was very marshy land so it proved to be too expensive to build there,” he said.

Del Rosario said the group is still looking for other potential sites in Iloilo.

He said that Phinma would be partnering with other groups like Gawad Kalinga for the community housing projects, noting that it will be very difficult to do it all by themselves.

“I am now turning my attention to housing. I have told our property company that I would like Phinma to do in housing what we are doing in the education by building decent homes and wholesome communities that are accessible to the underserved sector who need and deserve these homes the most,” Del Rosario said.