The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said it will no longer require banks to notarize their quarterly reports on residential and commercial real estate loans to streamline the process, effective immediately.
In Memorandum No. M-2025-026 signed by BSP Deputy Governor Zeno Ronald Abenoja on July 30, the BSP waives the notarization requirement for the reporting of residential real estate loans (RRELs) and the quarterly reports on appraised commercial properties (QRACP).
The new rule covers universal and commercial banks, thrift banks and digital banks.
The guidelines specifically amended four bank documents required for the BSP’s property price index report, namely the data submitted to the Department of Economic Statistics (DES) involving the commercial property price index.
The memo also included amendments to the residential real estate price index (RREPI), which is now referred to as the residential property price index (RPPI).
The BSP had earlier announced changes to the RREPI.
“This change aligns the index’s nomenclature with international standards, and more accurately, reflects its comprehensive coverage of residential property prices on the banking segment of the market,” Abenoja said in the memo.
The BSP said the process of reporting on the residential property price index (RPPI) has improved after it adopted the “hedonic regression” — a method using a more accurate measure of market trends by incorporating property-specific characteristics, such as location, size and type.
The BSP has started to process real estate information using the first quarter 2025 data for RPPI.
However, it said the RPPI has a more stable index values and growth rates even during market disruptions, such as the pandemic in 2020 to 2021. The BSP said it was able to verify this when it used the new method to review old data that came from the first quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2024.
The BSP said the old RREPI had limitations in terms of methodology because it had simple averages and assumed that all properties within a group were similar.
In contrast, the new RPPI has a much bigger coverage and includes new, pre-owned and foreclosed houses; and uses actual acquisition costs rather than appraised values, the BSP said.
