MANILA, Philippines—Filipinos reluctant to put their money in financial instruments are instead investing in property.

This is according to Eton Properties president Danilo Ignacio, who added that confidence in the property sector had bounced back in the first quarter.

“What I’m seeing now is a good indication of the economy and investor confidence,” Ignacio said. “At the end of the day, if an investor will look at his portfolio, where did he make money? In stocks, he lost money and also in derivatives. In Lehman, he lost money. If you put in banks, you get very little. But in real estate, nobody lost money, so in the first quarter, investor confidence came back.”

Because of this renewed interest, Ignacio said property prices had held up well in the Philippines.

“They did not go down. In fact, we were even able to increase our prices,” he said. “None of the developers reduced prices. Everybody was expecting us to bring down prices but what we did [instead] was suppress the supply, so we were able to maintain prices.”

Another recent trend is an increase in the number of buyers willing to give a higher cash down payment for their property purchases, Ignacio said.

Eton, in turn, gives higher discounts to those with larger cash payments.

Ignacio said the relatively buoyant property market was also due to the fact that the Philippines was not as affected by the global financial crisis as the United States, Japan, South Korea and Europe.

Even if growth in the domestic economic would slow down to 1-3 percent, he said this would still be better than the recession in other countries.

Eton, which has launched three new property projects this year, plans to launch at least two more by the third quarter.

One is an 8.6-hectare subdivision project in San Bartolome, Fairview, Quezon City, and the third phase of Eton City, which will cover 20 hectares (out of 1,000 hectares) of the township development in Sta. Rosa, Laguna.