Pag-ibig opens web site for better housing cyber guide to OFWs

Written by Manuel T. Cayon / Reporter

Wednesday, 20 May 2009 19:02

DAVAO CITY—The Pag-ibig Fund has opened a site in cyberspace for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and has invited housing developers to enlist in the information drive to tap the rich OFW market. The new window under the agency’s web site would give the baseline information that OFWs would like to know regarding investing their money on housing. “There are no information available to them until now. They don’t know what available housing projects there are, where these can be found, what rates are available,” Ophelia de la Cerna, Pag-ibig Fund senior vice president for provident fund, told housing developers in a forum at the Apo View Hotel here on Friday. With the new site, OFWs would just have to log on to the Internet and browse the Pag-ibig Fund website and enter the characters www.pagibigfund/hmp to look into the new home-matching program of the agency. Twelve housing developers in the Metro Manila area alone have already registered in the home-matching program, which would directly link them to the web site and allows inquiries to be directed to the offerings of these developers. One Davao City developer has also approached her at the break of the forum here Friday to inquire about the program and how he can be included. Developers listed in the site would also give the OFWs wider choices to invest. “What we would like our OFWs is to translate their inquiries into concrete application for housing loan,” de la Cerna told the housing developers’ forum. On the side of the developers, she said the OFW market could be gleaned from the profile of their work as provided by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. “In the Asia and the Pacific region, 31 percent of the Pag-ibig Fund members are household workers,” she said. “That means, that we can offer them our socialized housing and as much as the P750,000 housing packages.” In the Middle East, where 35 percent of the OFWs were skilled workers and being paid higher compared to the domestic help, “we believe they can afford the higher P1 million to P1.5 million housing.” In Europe, “there are household workers but in London, we have as many as 60 percent of our OFWs there who are professions, mostly nurses. They can afford the much higher packages we have.” So far, 12,000 OFWs have already availed themselves of the various packages of the Pag-ibig Fund in the past, despite the lack of specific information site for them. This has presented a problem among OFWs, of which 7.2 million were members of Pag-ibig Fund. “There have been a lot of difficulties in matching their needs and requirements because simply of the lack of information. They just don’t know that there are lots of projects that they can chose from.” De la Cerna said that Pag-ibig Fund extension offices abroad would take care of the processing of the applications of these OFWs once their needs and requirements would be matched with the available projects. “That we hope that many developers would also register themselves with us in that site,” she said.