Philippines - Residential Building Permits

For the Philippines, approved construction permits for residential and non-residential structures, for the country and subnational areas.

Data Buffet extracts only the count of permits, not the floor area, monetary value or cost of construction.

• Measurement: Unitary count (#)
• Adjustment: Not seasonally adjusted (NSA) 
• Native frequency: Quarterly
• Start date: As early as 2001Q1, but most series start at 2002Q1
• Geos: 
• PSGC 2017
• Country (IPHL)
• Regions (IPHL_aa)
• Provinces (IPHL_aaa)

Data processing of approved building permits is done both manually and mechanically. Copies of documents collected from the offices of local building officials (LBOs) are properly controlled, sorted, edited and coded, folioed and encoded in the PSA provincial offices. During machine validation, inconsistent and invalid entries which are flagged in an error listing are corrected in the data file. This process is repeated until there are no more inconsistent or erroneous entries found in the error listing. The data files are then forwarded to PSA Central Office for validation, consolidation and generation of preliminary tables. Data files received after the cut-off dates of submission set for each quarter are included in the generation of annual tables.

Preliminary results are based from data files that have undergone data processing in the provincial offices and have been validated at the Central Office. The preliminary tables are revised to include building permit documents received after the cut-off period in the annual tabulation. 

Types of action included: New construction; addition (any new construction that increases the height or area of an existing building/structure); alteration and repair of existing structures.

Definitions

Building permit

a written authorization granted by the LBO to an applicant allowing him to proceed with the construction of a specific project after plans, specifications, and other pertinent documents have been found to be in conformity with the National Building Code (PD 1096).

Construction

refers to all on-site work done from site preparation, excavation, foundation, assembly of all the components and installation of utilities, machineries, and equipment of buildings/structures.

Building

any independent, free-standing structure comprised of one or more rooms or other spaces, covered by a roof and enclosed with external walls or dividing walls, which extend from the foundation to the roof.

Residential building

a building for which its major parts or more than half of its gross floor area is built for dwelling purposes. This type of building can be of the single type, duplex, apartment and/or accessoria,and residential condominium.

Non-residential building

commercial, industrial, agricultural, and institutional buildings.

Moody's Analytics supplements

For the quarterly count of permitted residential and non-residential dwelling units, we compute a seasonally adjusted counterpart.

Data is preliminary when first publish so are subject to revisions.

Further reading

At the source:

• Construction statistics » Technical notes (2016)
• Construction statistics » Technical notes (2021Q1)