Iloilo City keeps construction boom amid pandemic

ILOILO CITY –– Construction activities in the city, including a 405-room hotel to be put up by giant property developer Megaworld Corp., remained unabated despite an economic slump in Western Visayas.

The city government has received 1,037 building permit applications and approved 655 as of April 16, said the city’s public information office.

The number of applications for the first three-and-a-half months this year has surpassed the 990 approved business permits last year.

Megaworld recently held a groundbreaking ceremony for Belmont Hotel at the 72-hectare Iloilo Business Park (IBP) in Mandurriao District, near the Iloilo Convention Center.

The property developer said demand for office space at the IBP had continued despite strict lockdowns last year.

“Last year alone, Megaworld closed lease deals with seven companies that are either first-time locators or existing locators looking for expansion spaces in Iloilo, totaling to almost 28,000 square meters of office spaces,” according to a Megaworld statement.

Roland Tiongson, first vice president of Megaworld Premier Offices, said the IBP covered around 20 percent of their total office lease transactions in 2020.

“This is now the brightest spot in our office leasing business, and we are very happy that our Iloilo township has been an attractive location to many multinational companies,” he said in the statement.

The continued construction activities and real estate development projects in the city are bright spots amid a 9.7-percent drop in the Gross Domestic Regional Product of Western Visayas in 2020, after a 6.3-percent growth in 2019.

The region has been hit hard by the travel and community quarantine restrictions, especially in the tourism industry and service sectors.

The service sector alone contracted by 8.9 percentage points.

The National Economic Development Authority (Neda) in the region reported that 1,013 establishments had retrenched their workers, and another 204 had shut down. These affected 11,534 workers.

But the region’s agriculture sector, which had been declining in previous years, registered a 4.7-percent growth in the value of production.

Crop production grew by 10.2 percent, with gains in palay and corn.

Palay production increased by 10.48 percent last year, reaching 2,295,580 metric tons (mt), while corn production reached 320,380 mt, a 2.04-percent increase compared to 2019, according to the Neda regional office.

LZB