Gov’t eyeing to bundle small idle properties to attract buyers

Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III MALACANANG FILE PHOTO

The government is looking at bundling together small idle real estate properties in its privatization pipeline to make them more attractive to buyers, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said.

“We have a range of assets, and we are spending an inordinate amount of time in the small stuff, because they are a lot. We have inherited from closed banks, bad assets, a number of [small] lots, like 100 square meters,” Dominguez recently told reporters.

Dominguez said he already instructed the Privatization and Management Office (PMO) as well as the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. to instead dispose of these properties in packages hopefully starting the middle of next year.

“I asked them: We are spending 80 percent of our manpower to generate 10 percent of our revenue, so why don’t we just bundle those small assets together and sell them as one to a group and really use our time to spend on the big ticket items? It’s better use of our time than chasing around appraisals for small lots. Let’s just bundle them all together and bid it out. Let the private sector deal with that if they are better than us,” Dominguez said.

Dominguez, who sits as the Duterte administration’s representative in the Monetary Board of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, also disclosed that the BSP has about 26,000 titles of foreclosed properties.

“So I told them, why don’t they look at that also? Let’s not waste our time and be concentrated on the big-ticket items,” the Finance chief said.

Dominguez said included in the privatization pipeline were a number of mines in Davao and the Visayas regions. “They are big-ticket items that we are spending money on guarding the asset because we have so many small ones, we don’t have the focus on the large ones… I think the money of the taxpayer is better spent on focusing on the big-ticket items,” he said.

But Dominguez admitted that for some big-ticket properties, there were also legal problems delaying their sale.

As for the smaller assets in the pipeline of the PMO, Chief Privatization Officer Gerard L. Chan said about P100-million worth will be disposed of in the first quarter of next year.

“The necessary approvals were not procured at the moment, so we are processing them,” Chan said.

Dominguez said the Mile Long property in Makati City was among the assets that had been programmed to be privatized next year.

“The privatization of Mile Long is also in the works,” Chan confirmed. /je