The Philippine REIT (P-REIT) market has been live since 2009 but a combination of high public ownership requirements (67%) and transaction taxes had turned off property companies from listing vehicles. However, this has since been revised with the public ownership requirement now lower

ed to 33% and asset transfers free of VAT. In our view, this should kickstart the REIT market especially with many large developers eager to recycle capital from the mature commercial portfolios on their books; this process of price discovery could compress commercial yields by at least 100bps within Metro Manila.