Eton plans to go into hotel development

Lucio Tan-led Eton Properties Philippines Inc. expects to open its mixed-use high-rise building in Makati City, which will feature the first of the company’s planned several “businessman’s hotels,” in two and a half years.

The project, Belton Place Makati, will be located at the center of the Makati Central Business District, near Ayala and Buendia Avenues. It will cater to the growing number of foreign executives traveling and bringing their business to the Asia-Pacific region.

“We are currently doing a feasibility study for the Belton Place Makati to have a hotel,” Eton president Danilo Ignacio said in a recent interview.

“We are now in negotiations with several hotel operators,” he said.

Ignacio told reporters that the new hotel “will be geared more for businessmen but we are still studying the kind of hotel we want.”

He said business hotels should not sacrifice the comfort of five-star establishments, but rates could be lower due to the absence of amenities such as swimming pools and spas that were usually seen in tourist-oriented hotels.

Under the plan, seven of the 40 floors of Belton will be used for the hotel while residential units will occupy most of the top floors. The middle part of the building will be for “small-office, home-office,” or soho, oriented units.

At the very bottom of the building will be retail establishments, Ignacio said.

He said the company was also considering the possibility of building a similar hotel for traveling executives at the Eton Centris complex on Epifanio de los Santos Ave. (Edsa) in Quezon City.

The Eton Centris area is the largest privately owned piece of land on Edsa, Metro Manila’s main thoroughfare.

Ignacio said he was confident that the property sector would continue to post robust gains for several years to come, driven by low interest rates, a high housing backlog and improving financial situation in the country.

“There is so much money around. Even if the central bank increases its interest rates, there is still P1.6 billion in cash parked in SDAs [special deposit accounts] and that’s a lot of liquidity,” he said.

“Banks are lending below 6 percent for housing loans. That’s unheard of,” he said.—Paolo G. Montecillo