Metro Manila's 2026 Condo Glut: An Ayala Buyer's View

If you have read any Philippine property headline this year, you have seen the number: a record pile of unsold condominiums in Metro Manila. It is real. It is also being reported at two different sizes by two respected research houses, in a way that tells you a great deal about how to read any of it.

Here is what the current data actually says, what it means if you are buying an Ayala Land unit specifically, and where it genuinely argues for caution. Every figure below is attributed. Where the honest answer is that it depends on the tower, I say so.

The headline numbers, and why two of them disagree

Colliers figures as reported by Manila Bulletin on 12 August 2026 and Gulf News on 5 August 2026. Leechiu figures as reported by GMA News on 7 July 2026.

Look at the launch row. Colliers has first-half launches collapsing 64 percent. Leechiu has them rising 18 percent. Both houses are competent and neither is lying. They are counting different universes, with different segment cutoffs and different definitions of what counts as a launch. I cannot tell you which count is right, and anyone who claims they can is selling something.

What matters is that the two agree on everything that affects you. Inventory is at or near a record. Take-up is improving off a low base. And the time to clear is now measured in years rather than months, against a historical norm closer to a single year. Note also that the two clearance figures are not the same measure and are built differently, so do not average them.

Where the unsold inventory actually sits

This is the part that gets flattened in headlines, and it is the whole story.

Colliers put Metro Manila residential vacancy at 24.9 percent in Q2 2026, up from 24.7 percent in Q1, and expects it to peak at a record 25.6 percent by end-2026 before easing to roughly 23.9 percent in 2027. That is the average. The distribution is brutal.

In 2025, Colliers had Bay Area vacancy already above 50 percent, while Makati CBD, Rockwell Center and Ortigas Center held below 15 percent. For 2026 it expects Bay Area vacancy to approach 60 percent, and expects the Bay Area to overtake Fort Bonifacio as Metro Manila's largest residential condominium hub by year-end, at about 46,300 units.

Read that twice. One submarket is heading toward six vacant units in ten while simultaneously becoming the largest single stock of condominiums in the metro. That is not a Metro Manila problem being shared evenly. That is a Bay Area problem being averaged into everybody else's number.

What is actually selling

Colliers has economic and affordable condominiums, priced between ₱1.8 million and ₱3.6 million, accounting for a combined 67 percent of Metro Manila condominium net take-up in the first half of 2026, with the affordable band alone at 38 percent.

The corollary matters if you are buying higher up. About 9,300 unsold ready-for-occupancy units sit in the ₱3.601 million to ₱5 million band. That is a specific, crowded shelf. If you are buying RFO in that range, you are competing against thousands of near-substitutes, and you should be negotiating like it.

Rents are the number that should actually move you

Yield, not headline supply, is where oversupply bites an investor. Leechiu's first-half 2026 rental data shows how uneven that bite is.

BGC essentially flat, Taguig up 15 percent, Bay Area down 59 percent. Those are not variations on a theme. They are different markets sharing one skyline.

Two caveats before you build a model on this. These are asking rate movements, so they reflect changes in what landlords are offering as much as changes in what tenants will pay. And a single half-year move of that magnitude usually says as much about mix and repricing as about underlying demand. Treat the direction as the signal and the magnitude as approximate. If you are working out actual yields, the investor guide has the mechanics.

What it has done to prices, which is less than the rent story implies

The BSP's Residential Property Price Index, which replaced the RREPI as the official national house price index from Q1 2025, had residential prices up 4.5 percent year on year in Q1 2026, easing from 7.6 percent a year earlier. Median NCR condominium price was ₱5.32 million.

At the top end, Colliers has the average luxury three-bedroom unit in Metro Manila CBDs at roughly ₱197,500 per square metre in Q1 2026, down from ₱202,590 per square metre in Q3 2025.

So nationally, prices are still rising, just more slowly. At the CBD luxury end, per-square-metre pricing has slipped modestly. Neither of those is a crash and neither is a boom. A market carrying record unsold stock and 25 percent vacancy while still posting positive nominal national price growth is telling you that supply and price are not moving in lockstep, largely because developers have been slowing launches rather than cutting list prices. In 2026 the concession lives in the payment terms, not in the price sheet. That is the single most useful sentence on this page.

Where the glut genuinely argues for caution

Four situations where I slow a buyer down.

One, buying purely for yield in a submarket where published vacancy is above 40 percent. The Bay Area is the obvious case. No amount of unit-level quality fixes a submarket carrying that much competing supply.

Two, buying RFO at list price in the ₱3.6 million to ₱5 million band. With roughly 9,300 unsold RFO units on that shelf, paying list is a choice rather than a requirement.

Three, running a rental proforma built before 2024. If your spreadsheet assumes the Makati or Alabang rent you saw two years ago, the Leechiu figures say it is stale by a wide margin.

Four, buying into an area about to absorb a large new tranche. Colliers expects about 13,000 new condominium units to enter Metro Manila in 2026, with roughly a third of upcoming supply concentrated along the C5 corridor. That is worth knowing if you are looking at anything on C5, and yes, that includes Ayala's own Parklinks estate. I would rather say it here than have you find it in a competitor's listing.

Where the Ayala footprint sits against this map

Some of this is checkable against the catalogue on this site rather than argued.

Across the 47 active Alveo projects and the 24 Ayala Land Premier projects listed here, there is no Bay Area or Pasay inventory at all. The metro concentration is Makati (17 projects), Taguig across BGC and Arca South (14), Quezon City (8), Pasig (3), Manila (2) and Las Piñas and Alabang (2), with the balance in Laguna, Cavite, Pampanga, Cebu, Davao and other provincial estates.

Set that against the published data and it cuts both ways. Makati CBD is one of the submarkets Colliers had holding vacancy below 15 percent in 2025, and Taguig is where Leechiu records the strongest rent growth in the metro. But Quezon City is a large unsold market and there is Ayala inventory in it. Alabang is where Leechiu records a 42 percent rent decline, and there are two projects there. No consultancy publishes vacancy by developer, so anyone who tells you a particular brand's towers are full is guessing. What the catalogue does show is that the worst-affected submarket in the published data is one this developer did not build in.

There is a quieter second fact. Of the 75 Alveo projects on this site, 28 are already sold out, and 33 of the 47 active projects are still in preselling rather than sitting as completed unsold stock. That is a different shape from a developer holding a large RFO overhang, and it is part of why the Q2 2026 inventory update reads differently from the market-wide numbers.

The honest answer is that it depends on the tower

Estate-integrated, land-scarce, end-user-anchored projects do behave differently from commodity towers, and the vacancy gap between the Bay Area and Makati CBD is the evidence. But estate integration is not a spell. A weak floor plate in a good estate can still be a bad buy, and a well-located tower can still be badly timed if four thousand units complete around it in the same year.

So ask tower-level questions, not market-level ones. How many units are in the building, and how many complete within a kilometre of it in the same 24 months? What is the current asking rent for your exact unit type in that exact building, not the submarket average? Is the estate still building out, and what is left to launch? And what are the developer's live payment terms, given that in this market the concession lives there?

How to use all of this

If you are an end user with a real housing need and financing that works, oversupply is close to the best news you will get. This is a buyer's market, terms are softer than they have been in years, and where interest rates sit will move your monthly payment far more than the supply headline will.

If you are an investor, the supply picture argues for being much pickier about submarket and unit type than you needed to be five years ago, and for at least checking whether a horizontal product suits you better. Condo versus residential lot sets out that trade honestly, including why a lot is the wrong instrument if you need income from day one.

And if you are weighing an RFO discount against a preselling entry, this is precisely the market where that calculation shifts. Preselling versus RFO covers the trade-off in full, but the 2026 short version is that RFO carries more negotiating room than usual while preselling carries less price protection than the launch decks imply.

Send me the specific building you are considering and I will give you the tower-level read rather than the market-level one. The current Alveo and Ayala Land Premier inventory is a reasonable place to start.