Philippine REITs: A Five-Year Report Card

Performance, asset quality, and what's really driving trading value — an interactive comparison of all eight PSE-listed REITs

Six years after AREIT's 2020 listing opened the market, the Philippines now has eight publicly traded real estate investment trusts, with a combined market capitalisation north of ₱420 billion.

That's a meaningful pool of prime office, retail, industrial and, in one case, renewable-energy assets now available to any investor with a brokerage account. It is also long enough a track record to start asking a sharper question than "what's the yield?": which of these vehicles are actually compounding value from good real estate and disciplined management, and which are simply priced to reflect risk the market has already spotted?

The spread is the story. Yield ranges from 5.9% to nearly 12%; price-to-earnings from under 5x to not meaningful; trailing earnings growth from +30% to −470%. A yield-only reading of the table above would send you straight to PREIT or DDMPR. A closer look at what sits underneath each ticker tells a different story.

The scale leaders: AREIT and RCR

AREIT, sponsored by Ayala Land, remains the benchmark. Its portfolio value climbed to roughly ₱139 billion in 2025 (from ₱117 billion in 2024) and is set to rise further once a pending Ayala Center Cebu/Ayala Malls Feliz swap closes, pushing gross leasable area toward 4.7 million square metres — the largest of any Philippine REIT once buildings and industrial land are combined. Occupancy has held at 99%. Ayala Land injected a record ₱40.5 billion of assets into AREIT in 2025 alone, spanning office towers, malls and industrial land across Metro Manila, Cebu, Davao and Cagayan de Oro. FY2025 net income rose 28% to ₱9.4 billion, and the dividend grew 5.7% to ₱2.41 per share. AREIT's addition to the PSEi in February 2025 materially widened its investor base.

RL Commercial REIT (RCR), backed by Robinsons Land and the Gokongwei family, tells a similar growth story with a different balance-sheet posture: it is entirely debt-free, with total assets of ₱167.8 billion across 38 properties (21 malls, 17 offices) — soon 44, following a ₱10.6 billion, six-mall infusion announced in June 2026 at 96% occupancy. 2025 revenue rose 35% to ₱11.1 billion, the fastest growth in the sector, and RCR joined the PSEi in February 2026. At 4.6x trailing earnings, it is also the cheapest of the "blue-chip" tier on a P/E basis — a valuation that looks conservative if the injection pipeline (RLC has flagged over 1.1 million square metres of mall space alone still to come) continues to convert into earnings.

Both REITs share a structural wrinkle worth watching. A 2025 RCR–RLC property swap briefly pushed float toward 28.8% before analysts concluded it remained compliant; AREIT has twice had to raise fresh equity or sell down sponsor shares to rebuild float after similar swaps. It is a recurring, largely self-inflicted source of share-price noise in an otherwise strong growth story.

The diversifier and the specialist: MREIT and CREIT

MREIT, sponsored by Megaworld, is pursuing a similar office-led growth path, with a ninth-wave Taguig office injection cleared by the SEC in March 2026 and a stated target of 1 million square metres of GLA by 2027, partly through a move into retail assets. It posted a record dividend in Q1 2026 and carries the highest yield (7.31%) of the sector's blue-chip names, though its −12.5% trailing EPS growth reflects the near-term dilution that typically precedes a large asset injection landing in earnings.

Citicore Energy REIT (CREIT) occupies a category of one: it is the Philippines' only renewable-energy REIT, holding solar-farm land and infrastructure rather than office or retail buildings. That gives it a genuinely different risk and return profile, reinforced by a ₱4.5 billion ASEAN green bond issuance in 2023 and a ₱5 billion investment from the Sy family into parent Citicore Renewable Energy Corp in 2024. But growth has plateaued — 2024 profit rose only marginally, and trailing earnings are essentially flat — which is likely why the market has settled on a "Neutral" rating: a stable, differentiated income asset rather than a compounder.

Where the value gap shows up: FILRT, DDMPR, VREIT and PREIT

Filinvest REIT (FILRT) holds a respectable BPO and multinational office tenant base — it added global CX firm Gatestone & Co. to its roster as recently as May 2026 — yet local analysts have flagged underwhelming, "dud" dividends as far back as 2023. Its −30.1% trailing EPS growth is the weakest of any office-focused REIT in the sector, which points less to the quality of the real estate and more to capital allocation and payout discipline.

DDMP REIT (DDMPR), sponsored by DoubleDragon, is the clearest case of asset-quality erosion feeding directly into valuation: blended occupancy fell to 68.5% in March 2025, and weighted average lease expiry compressed to just 1.7 years, meaning a large share of its income depends on leases that must be renewed or replaced imminently. It trades at the lowest price and among the lowest market caps in the sector. Its +23.9% trailing EPS growth and 4.8x P/E look statistically cheap, but off a low and shrinking occupancy base, that combination reads as much like a warning sign as a value opportunity.

VistaREIT (VREIT) and Premiere Island Power REIT (PREIT), both sponsored by the Villar Group, round out the smaller end of the sector. Both have drawn analyst scrutiny over dividend payment timing and mechanics dating back to 2022–2023. PREIT, an industrial land and power-infrastructure REIT, is now posting negative trailing earnings and carries the smallest market cap and thinnest trading volume of the eight — its headline 11.82% yield is best read as the market pricing distribution risk, not rewarding income quality.

Inside the portfolios: the named assets behind the numbers

Aggregate metrics only tell half the story. Pulling the actual property lists from each REIT's own disclosures shows that the performance gap across the sector tracks portfolio composition and geographic concentration almost as closely as it tracks the balance sheet. Use the "View underlying assets" toggle on each card in the dashboard above to see the full, named property list behind every ticker — the short version for each is below.

AREIT spans at least seven cities across Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao — Makati CBD towers (Ayala North Exchange, Solaris One), Cebu IT Park (Teleperformance Cebu, eBloc 1–4), Vertis North and The 30th (QC/Pasig), plus Davao and Cagayan de Oro corporate centers — across office, retail, hotel and industrial land. No single submarket can move the whole portfolio, which is the structural reason behind its 99% occupancy and premium rating.

RCR's 21 malls and 17 offices give it the widest geographic spread of any PH REIT, but its flagship Metro Manila retail — Robinsons Place Manila, Robinsons Galleria Ortigas — stays with parent RLC and is not in the REIT. RCR's mall footprint is weighted toward secondary cities like Bacolod, Davao, Tacloban and Tuguegarao rather than destination retail, which helps explain why the market still prices it at a modest 4.6x P/E despite the fastest earnings growth in the sector.

MREIT is all-office, concentrated in three Megaworld townships: Eastwood City (QC), McKinley Hill/West (Taguig) and Iloilo Business Park. A pending "Wave 5" MOU would add its first malls (Eastwood Mall, Venice Mall, Lucky Chinatown Mall among them) — until that completes, earnings stay fully tied to the office-leasing cycle, consistent with its −12.5% trailing EPS growth.

FILRT is the most single-site concentrated office REIT in the sector: 16 of its 17 buildings sit inside one township, Filinvest City Alabang. A softening in that one submarket's vacancy or rents moves almost the entire REIT at once — a plausible explanation for the "dud" dividends flagged since 2023 and the weakest trailing EPS growth (−30.1%) of any office-focused REIT.

DDMPR takes concentration further still: 100% of its assets — DoubleDragon Plaza, Center East, Center West, DoubleDragon Tower and the Ascott serviced residences — sit inside one complex, DD Meridian Park in the Pasay Bay Area. (CityMall branches, often mistakenly associated with the REIT, actually belong to a separate DoubleDragon Corporation subsidiary.) There is no other market to cushion a downturn — the clearest structural explanation for the occupancy slide to 68.5% and the compressed 1.7-year WALE.

CREIT, by contrast, is arguably the most geographically diversified REIT in the sector by province count — solar sites spanning Pampanga, Tarlac, Bulacan, South Cotabato, Batangas, Cebu, Negros Occidental and Bataan, totalling roughly 145 MWdc. Its flat earnings growth isn't a concentration problem; long-dated, fixed-rate land leases simply grow slowly by design.

VREIT's ten malls and two offices form a community-mall network anchored around Vista Land's own residential subdivisions (four of ten malls in Cavite alone) rather than destination retail — a lower footfall profile than AREIT's or RCR's flagship malls, consistent with its smaller scale and thinner trading.

PREIT's underlying assets aren't conventional real estate at all: off-grid, diesel-fired power plants on Siquijor and Camotes islands. Fuel-cost exposure and a structurally capped growth ceiling, more than any REIT-specific governance issue, likely explain its negative trailing earnings.

What's actually driving trading value

Four things stand out from comparing these eight vehicles side by side, down to the asset level.

First, yield alone is a poor guide to quality in this market. The two highest-yielding names, PREIT and DDMPR, are also the two with the weakest occupancy, liquidity or earnings trends — the yield is compensation for risk, not a signal of value.

Second, asset quality — occupancy, lease expiry profile, tenant diversification, and geographic spread — is the sharper differentiator. AREIT's 99% occupancy and multi-city footprint sits at one end; DDMPR's 68.5% occupancy and 1.7-year WALE sits at the other. Relative trading value in between tracks that spectrum more closely than it tracks the dividend headline.

Third, sponsor pipeline discipline and index inclusion are now doing real work on valuations. AREIT and RCR both have multi-year, publicly disclosed injection pipelines from listed developer parents, and both have been added to the PSEi in the past eighteen months — a genuine liquidity and passive-demand catalyst that smaller REITs simply do not have access to. Against that, the minimum 33.33% public float requirement is an underappreciated structural risk precisely for the REITs growing fastest by acquisition, forcing periodic follow-on offerings or sponsor share sales that can weigh on share prices even as the underlying portfolio strengthens.

Fourth, geographic and single-site concentration is the clearest asset-level explanation for the laggards. FILRT (16 of 17 buildings in one Alabang township) and DDMPR (100% of assets in one Pasay complex) are the two most concentrated portfolios in the sector, and also carry the weakest dividend and occupancy track records respectively. CREIT is the exception that proves the rule: it is also concentrated by asset class (solar land), but its flat growth reflects the structurally slow-growing nature of fixed-rate land leases, not a quality problem.

The macro backdrop adds a further layer: the peso has been under renewed pressure this year, and elevated interest rates raise the bar for cap rates and cost of capital sector-wide — a headwind visible in the flat-to-negative trailing earnings growth at several REITs even where portfolios are expanding on paper.

Looking ahead, the sector itself may look different within two years. The SEC has signalled it is drafting reforms to widen the definition of REIT-eligible assets to include transmission towers, toll roads, power plants and telecom infrastructure — the same policy shift that underpins PLDT's plan for a roughly $400 million data-centre REIT IPO. A ninth listing, and a broader asset mix than office-retail-solar, would be a healthy next step for a market that is still young by regional standards.

For investors and occupiers alike, the lesson from the first five years of Philippine REITs is straightforward: read the property list before the dividend yield. Concentration risk hides in plain sight in every REIT's own disclosures — and it explains more of the performance gap than any single financial ratio.