Buhay Bahay

Building your dream home is a goal of a lifetime and to be able to realize this goal, one has to put in not only financial, but personal and emotional investments. For the average Filipino who has to work it out tough in order to buy a house, it gets frustrating when your investment is threatened with certain controversies. That is why I take personal interest in the issue about Globe Asiatique allegedly being blacklisted by state housing firm Pag-ibig Fund following controversies in its Xevera Pampanga project. I was particularly interested on how this issue related to me.

I put up my townhouse unit for sale a couple of months ago. The unit sits on a property called Saint Monique Valais which covers an approximate total land area of 200 hectares situated in Brgy. Pantok and Darangan (that's how big it is, crosses two barangays) in Binangonan, Rizal. It is about 25 kilometers away from Pasig City and is accessible via Ortigas Avenue, Manila East Road, or via Floodway and the National Highway of Angono. The place passed the "acid test" which was Ondoy.

We moved there in May 2008 after paying the equity. The housing loan application was quite easy as the procedure was facilitated by Filmal, the developer and sister-company of Globe Asiatique. Pag-ibig took out the loan application in August. Fairly easy.

Saint Monique is an ideal place to build a home for a starting family like ours. It is nestled along a valley and surrounded with trees and green fields my daughter calls "parang farmville!" The clean air and surroundings were perfect for my children's health as the frequency of their asthma attacks went down as the months passed by.

When my husband suggested that we consider this place, I was initially turned off because of its distance from work and other facilities (hospital, market, etc.) but when I personally checked it out, I instantly fell in love with the place. The property has become a community in itself as it includes a school (Colegio de St. Monique where I eventually enrolled my eldest), chapel, convenience store, and clubhouse. One selling point of the agent was that we were to become neighbors with celebrities as it was also the home of the Pinoy Big Brother contest winners. Guess you can say the starstruck factor on my eldest had a hand in the decisionmaking process :)

One of the many things I appreciate about the place is the neighborhood. Most of the dwellers in our block were young families with 1-2 kids and couples working in Metro Manila. Just a few weeks after moving in, we immediately felt comfortable and at home and made friends easily with our neighbors.

Despite enjoying our stay at Saint Monique, our circumstances called for making the tough decision to come back home and sell the house which we made home for barely two years. Of course the decision was not made in haste, amidst my personal battles I had to weigh the pros and cons of keeping it and came up with the decision which, at the emotional level, was entirely difficult. But I am a mother and I had to consider the well-being of the kids on top of mine.

Going back to the GA controversy and the house that I am selling, I have received quite a number of doubtful remarks already. But I patiently explain that my loan was already taken out in August 2008 and that I am no longer dealing with the developer, I deal directly with Pag-ibig now that my unit is under the process of transferring the Contract to Sell (CTS) from Filmal to Pag-ibig to a Real Estate Mortgage (REM) under my name. Yesterday I visited the unit to tidy it up a bit (our stuff are still in there) and to talk to two prospect buyers. I also met one representative from the homeowners' association who was with a Pag-ibig employee while they were taking an inventory of the units. I guess one of the positive outcomes of the controversy was that now that they are in the hot seat, they have become more proactive now in doing their jobs.

I am offering the unit in flexible terms. PM me for details.