How to Check a Philippine Property Agent, Broker or Developer Yourself — Three Documents, Not a Recommendation List

Three documents come before everything else

The order is fixed: documents before people, evidence before impressions. Each of the three answers a different question, and you need all three.

• The broker's professional licence answers: is the person across the table qualified to take my money and negotiate this deal? Section 29 of the Real Estate Service Act (RA 9646) prohibits practising or holding oneself out as practising real estate service without having passed the licensure examination and holding a valid certificate of registration and professional identification card, or a special temporary permit; brokers must also post the professional indemnity bond the law requires.
• The developer's licence to sell answers: may this project be sold at all? Section 5 of PD 957 provides that a developer holding a certificate of registration must first obtain a licence to sell before selling lots or condominium units. For a pre-selling purchase this is mandatory to check, not optional.
• A certified true copy of the title answers: who actually owns this asset right now, and what is attached to it? This one you must pull yourself from the registry. A photocopy handed to you does not substitute.

Why not reorder them? Because the first two concern the counterparty's standing and the third concerns the asset's condition — and in most property purchases that go wrong, the warning was visible in one of the three well before money moved. Office size, response speed and "someone I know dealt with them" are impressions; look at them after the documents, not instead of them.

An opening line you can use verbatim: "Please send me your registration number, the licence-to-sell number for this project, and the title number for this unit — I will verify them myself." The value of that sentence is that it is a verifiable request. A compliant counterparty produces the numbers immediately. One that deflects, delays indefinitely, or turns it around into a complaint about your trust has already answered you.

If you can get all three numbers and they check out, the deal is worth continuing. → Have Yixing verify the three documents with you

Document one: the broker's licence, and who is lawfully exempt

Ask for the number, verify its current status, then verify that the number belongs to the person in front of you. Skip any of the three and the check is easy to defeat.

Step one: collect three items — full legal name, professional registration number, and identification. Real estate service is a regulated profession in the Philippines, and Section 29 of RA 9646 prohibits unlicensed practice and holding oneself out as a practitioner, with brokers also required to post the statutory bond. "I work in property" is not a qualification; a number is. The mechanics are in how to check a Philippine broker's licence.

Step two: verify status, not mere existence. A number that returns a record is not the same as a licence that is currently valid. Registrations carry validity periods and require renewal, so what you want confirmed is present validity rather than historical existence.

Step three: confirm the person matches the number. The most common substitution is that a firm genuinely employs a licensed broker, but the individual who negotiates with you, collects your money and countersigns your documents is someone else without a licence. The defence is simple: insist that the person who signs the documents is the person whose number you verified, and if they differ, ask on the spot who carries responsibility.

Know that the law also provides exemptions. Certain persons are not required to be licensed, typically owners dealing in their own property (developers excluded) and agents acting without compensation. The practical meaning: encountering an unlicensed owner-seller is not automatically a problem. A compensated intermediary who cannot produce a licence is an entirely different matter.

Finally, commissions and payment routing. This page discusses no rates and no amounts, only one discipline: the payee must match the contracting party, preferably a corporate account rather than a personal one, and must be able to issue a proper receipt or invoice. A payment account that does not match the contracting entity is the single strongest stop signal in the whole exercise.

Document two: the licence to sell, and who regulates the project

For a pre-selling purchase, the licence to sell is your first line of defence against a project that should not be on the market at all. Section 5 of PD 957 provides that a developer with a certificate of registration must obtain a licence to sell before selling lots or condominium units. Without it, the project cannot lawfully be sold at this time.

Verify in three steps. First, establish the exact project name and location, because the licence attaches to a specific project — often a specific phase — and not to the developer's brand. A licence for project A says nothing about project B under the same developer. Second, ask for the licence number and issue date, and cross-check it against the certificate of registration. Third, confirm with the regulator: oversight of subdivision and condominium projects sits with the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development, established under RA 11201, and both verification and complaints run through that channel. The practical steps are in how to verify a licence to sell.

Check the advertising against the registered documents at the same time. The architecture of PD 957 is registration, then licence, with sales advertising consistent with what was registered. So the delivery standard, amenities and floor area described in the showroom should have a counterpart in the registered documents and in the contract. Anything with no counterpart should be treated as non-existent for the purposes of your payment decision.

Pre-selling buyers also have two layers of statutory protection worth knowing before signing. One is the registration and licensing regime of PD 957 itself. The other is RA 6552, the Maceda Law, which gives instalment buyers grace periods and, in defined circumstances, a refund entitlement banded by how long they have paid. No ratios or figures appear here; the computation and its scope are in the Maceda Law refund guide. Note that it carries an express exclusion list and does not cover a bank-financed structure.

If project name, licence number and registration documents do not reconcile, stop before the showroom persuades you. → Have Yixing reconcile the licence and registration for your project

Document three: the certified true copy, and which lines to read

This is the decisive one and the one most often skipped, because it requires you to do something yourself. The rule is single: do not rely on the copy handed to you; obtain a certified true copy from the Registry of Deeds. A handed-over photocopy can be outdated, selectively supplied, or fabricated. A certified copy reflects what the registry records right now.

Why registration carries so much weight. Section 51 of PD 1529 provides that, as far as third persons are concerned, it is the act of registration that operates to convey or affect the land. Section 52 provides that a registered instrument constitutes constructive notice to all persons from the time of registration. In plain terms: what is on the register, you are presumed to know — not having looked is not a defence.

When the copy arrives, read these lines:

• The registered owner's name, matched exactly against the seller's identification, including spelling, middle name and marital designation.
• Area, lot number or unit number, matched against the contract and against the unit you actually viewed.
• The encumbrance annotations — mortgages, attachments, adverse claims, easements, or an already-registered contract of sale. That last one can mean the asset has already been sold to someone else. How to read annotations is in what the annotations on a Philippine title mean, and the authenticity routine is in how to check whether a title is genuine.

One cheap follow-up worth scheduling: pull a second certified copy some time after you start paying. Section 17 of PD 957 requires the seller to register contracts to sell and deeds of sale covering subdivision lots and condominium units with the registry for the locality, whether or not the price has been fully paid. Your contract should therefore appear in the annotations. If it does not appear by the time it should, that is a question to raise immediately.

Two more things that never appear in the contract: whether anyone is currently occupying the property, and whether there is a live dispute over the land. Both have to be established by visiting and by asking at the registry.

Seven signals that should stop a payment

A recommendation list proves that someone posted, not that a firm is compliant today. Instead of hunting for lists, memorise seven signals. Any one of them is a reason to pause.

1. No numbers. Registration number, licence-to-sell number, title number — if any of them is perpetually "coming later," that is the answer.
2. A demand for original documents. The process needs copies and authenticated instruments. There is no good reason for your passport or an owner's duplicate certificate to sit with a counterparty for weeks.
3. Payee does not match the contracting party. Particularly requests to remit to a personal account, or to an entity with no relationship to the company named in the contract.
4. They volunteer a nominee arrangement. "The foreign quota is full, put it under a local name and transfer it later" is not a workaround; it engages anti-dummy exposure, and the exposure is yours. When you hear it, the thing to reassess is the counterparty.
5. Promises of outcome or of timing. "Guaranteed transfer" or "you will definitely have the title within a month" — several independent agencies are involved and nobody can commit on their behalf. A guarantee of approval is a reason to end the conversation.
6. They cannot say which steps require you personally. Anyone who has actually run the full process can immediately identify which acts need the principal and which can go through an authenticated power of attorney. Vagueness here usually means they have not completed one.
7. A quote that cannot be broken down. You are not asking for a number. You are asking them to split the cost into blocks: which parts are collected by government offices, which are their own service, which will move with the assessed tax base. A quote that cannot be split will grow new line items later.

Conversely, some things are not signals: a small office, a short trading history, or a refusal to hand over past clients' contact details, which is usually a privacy matter. Anchor the judgment to verifiable evidence rather than to impressions.

When any of the seven appears, the cheapest possible action is to pause the payment. → Ask Yixing for a second-opinion check when something feels off

What can be delegated, what cannot, and where to go when it goes wrong

Setting the boundary in advance beats assigning blame afterwards. On a property purchase, the split looks roughly like this.

Delegable: obtaining certified copies and tax declarations, assembling and cross-checking the documents for each government stop, locating the receiving offices for the property, laying statutory deadlines onto a schedule, accompanying filings and following up, and coordinating notarization and translation. All of that is administrative work, and handing it over saves a great deal of travel.

Not delegable: signing your own legal instruments, unless you have executed a properly scoped and authenticated special power of attorney; making your payment decisions; carrying the outcome of a negotiation over who bears which tax; and above all, guaranteeing any agency's decision. How to structure the authority and the schedule when you are abroad is in the timeline and offices guide.

When something goes wrong, sort it into three. Disputes with a developer over the project or the contract go through the regulator's complaint channel — see where to file a property complaint. Legal disputes over title, double sales or forged documents belong with a Philippine lawyer, and early matters, because many remedies are time-bound. And where money has been paid and the counterparty has gone quiet, the evidence chain decides everything: assemble the contract, receipts, remittance advices, message history and every document they ever supplied, in chronological order. The taxonomy of failures and the order of remedies is in the six ways purchases fail.

This article is general information. It supplies no list of firms and rates no developer, project, agency or brokerage; verification results follow the records held by the responsible agencies at the time you check. It is not legal or tax advice, and individual cases should be put to a Philippine lawyer and a tax professional. Yixing is a privately owned consultancy registered in the Philippines with no affiliation to any government agency. Our role is administrative — checking against the list, scheduling, and accompanying filings — and we promise no outcomes. Our original accreditation documents are kept at the front desk for inspection.

Do the three checks yourself first; then decide who handles the legwork. → Hand the administrative stretch to Yixing