The Cheap City Is Not Cheap. It Is Just Smaller.

This page used to say the average Philippine house costs 32.8 million pesos.

That number is correct. I checked it. It is also close to useless, and here is why.

One House Ruins The Average

The data is 1,500 houses for sale, taken from a property website. Half of them ask less than 9.2 million pesos.

But 103 of them ask 100 million or more. One asks 2.5 billion.

When you add up 1,500 prices and divide by 1,500, that one 2.5 billion peso house counts as much as 272 ordinary ones. So the average gets dragged way up, and lands somewhere almost nobody is shopping.

The middle price cannot be dragged like that. It is just the house in the middle of the line. That is the number to use.

Now The Fun Part

Everyone knows Manila is expensive and the provinces are cheap. The prices say so loudly: across the cities with enough listings to measure, the dearest is 13 times the cheapest.

So I divided each price by the size of the house. Pesos per square metre. That way a huge house and a small one can be compared fairly.

The 13 times gap shrank to 2.9 times.

Take Cabanatuan, a city in Nueva Ecija, about two hours north of Manila. A house there costs about a quarter of a Quezon City house.

Per square metre, Cabanatuan is more expensive. ₱92,587 against ₱85,058.

So the "cheap city" is not selling cheap space. It is selling less of it. Almost the whole map of expensive-and-cheap turns out to be a map of big-and-small.

What The Website Cannot Tell Me

Three things, and they are big.

Not one of the 1,500 has a date on it. So I cannot say whether prices went up or down. The old version of this page had charts about growth and trends. There was nothing to build them from.

Every price is what a seller is asking. Not what anyone paid. Those are different numbers and I do not know by how much.

And the website went wherever it went. 138 houses in Muntinlupa. Almost none in the whole middle of the country. This is one shop's shelf, not the Philippines.

So I Went And Got Real Numbers

If you want to know how Filipinos actually live, ask about water, toilets, power and stoves. Those get counted properly, for the whole country, every year.

Almost everyone — 95.86 out of every 100 households — has what the counters call "basic" drinking water. That means a decent source you can walk to and back from in half an hour.

Only 48.48 have water that is "safely managed": on your own property, there when you turn it on, and clean.

Nearly half the country sits in the gap between those two words.

The Stove Gap

This is the one that surprised me most.

Cooking on clean fuel — gas, electricity, anything that does not fill the room with smoke — reaches 79.8 out of every 100 town households.

In the countryside: 39.9.

That is a 39.9 point gap. Power has an 11.3 point gap. Water has 4.7. Toilets have none worth naming. Stoves are in a category of their own.

And across six neighbouring countries, the Philippines is last on this, at 59.5 out of 100. Next up is Malaysia at 83.8. Vietnam is at 98.7.

One Thing Going The Other Way

Basic toilets: 87.47 in the countryside, 86.81 in towns.

The countryside is ahead. Barely — close enough that the honest thing to say is that they are level. But it is the only one of the four where towns do not win, and I did not expect to find even one.

Two Halves That Do Not Match

The top of this page is 1,500 houses advertised at 9.2 million pesos in the middle.

The bottom is a country where 35.87 out of every 100 town-dwellers live in informal settlements, and two in five rural families still cook over smoke.

I did not try to connect them. There is nothing in either dataset that would let me. But putting them on one page felt more honest than putting either one there alone.