Italpinas plans to bring projects to Metro Manila

ITALPINAS Development Corp., a listed company whose projects are located in second- and third-tier cities in the country, said it has plans to bring its projects to Metro Manila, where its green buildings are mostly needed.

However, the company said it will have to take time as it is still waiting for the “right circumstances.”

In an interview, Italpinas President Jose Leviste III said the company may bring its green-building projects to Metro Manila, the country’s main trading area, possibly by next year, as it is still in talks with landowners.

“We would come to Metro Manila under the right circumstances. We don’t feel Manila is necessarily the better place to work [right now]. We’re fully satisfied with the direction we took from the start, which was that we don’t necessarily want to be in the most sophisticated, populated, modernized city in the country. We want to be where the growth is going to be seen as the most exciting,” Leviste said.

Leviste added that Italpinas, a company that started from scratch with capitalization of just over P600 million, is “happy” about its projects in Cagayan de Oro City, where it is currently starting the construction work for two buildings that will form part of its mixed-use project called Primavera City.

The two buildings of Primavera City, currently the flagship project of the company, will also contain 3,000 square meters of office space that will be offered to business-process outsourcing firms.

The two buildings early this year received a green-building certification from the International Finance Corp. (IFC)-backed Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies (EDGE).

Italpinas is the second company in the Philippines to receive the EDGE certification from the IFC, the private-sector arm of the World Bank.

Italian architect Romolo Nati, also the company’s COO, said he hopes to have the company’s other projects to be EDGE certified, such its Miramonti project in Santo Tomas, Batangas.

An EDGE certification is a cheaper alternative compared with other green-building certificates, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Developers mainly charge a premium to those unit buyers of a green building, as it is viewed to cost more to construct due to environmental concerns. Builders also shell out extra for the certification, which like in most other certifying bodies, has to be maintained on a regular basis to keep the certificate.

“The capital costs for the project to be built green typically range from 1 percent to 3 percent extra for the property developer,” IFC said in an e-mail statement to the BusinessMirror. “Certification costs are additional and are usually less than $10,000 [for EDGE], depending on the complexity of the project.”

The two buildings of Primavera City, for instance, promise to have a 33 percent higher energy-efficiency, as it uses external-shading devices, insulation of roof and external walls, energy-saving lighting system and solar panels to augment its energy system. It also uses 33 percent higher water-efficiency, and 32 percent less embodied energy in materials, as it will use medium- weight hollow concrete blocks for its walls, according to its EDGE certification.

The company said Primavera, which will have 163 units for Tower 1 and 166 units for Tower 2, will be constructed at a cost of P670 million, including the land. The company already secured a P350-million loan from state-owned Development Bank of the Philippines to partly fund its construction.

Nati said the company hopes to generate P1.4 billion in sales from the units of the two buildings.

Its second project called Miramonti is located in Santo Tomas, Batangas, and will be constructed for between P700 million and P750 million.

Italpinas, which only became public last year, will sell the units of both developments between P85,000 and P95,000 per sq m.

Construction for both projects may start by this year, Nati said.

The company may launch Primavera City by next month and Miramonti by the end of the year.

Although the company still has to receive its license to sell to the public for the two projects, he said Italpinas hopes to launch two to three more projects by next year.

“We are present in Mindanao and Luzon. We want to be present in the Visayas. There are so many cities that we have been scouting for undiscovered properties,” Nati said, but did not give out further details.

“We intend to stick to our key concepts. We’d like to explore undiscovered opportunities in markets that we believe may be underserved for now. So that’s the theme that runs in all of our attempts. So we’ll stick to that approach,” Leviste said.

Italpinas said its profit soared by more than double last year to a a net income of P44.476 million, compared to P18.356 million the previous year.

Net-profit margin improved to 21 percent in 2015, from 14 percent in 2014, the company said.

Italpinas also said it expanded its operating revenue to P216.5 million, or an increase of 62 percent, from its sales level of P133.9 million in 2014.

Its operating net income also grew more than double to to P51.1 million in 2015 from P22.3 million in 2014.

In 2015, total resources of IDC of P579.1 million grew by more than 20 percent from its 2014 asset level of P480.2 million.