Renting an Office in Makati: Four Sub-Markets, the Age Gap in the Stock, and the Clauses That Cost Money

Makati CBD Is Four Sub-Markets, Not One Address

Brokers talk about Makati as a single CBD, but deals happen in four distinct rings with different tenants, different unit sizes and different commutes.

Ring one is the Ayala Avenue spine, including where it meets Paseo de Roxas and Makati Avenue. This is where banks, insurers, large law firms, listed companies and multinational headquarters sit. Buildings connect through walkways and underground links, and the rail and bus stops are right there. The trade-off is unit size: most availability comes as full floors or large blocks, and a small requirement of a couple of hundred square metres rarely surfaces in the better buildings on the spine.

Ring two is Salcedo Village, a mixed office and residential grid with the highest density of small and mid-sized professional firms in the country: accounting practices, executive search, consultancies and foreign representative offices. Its defining feature is the spread of building ages, with decades-old blocks facing new towers across a street. Small units are most abundant here, and landlords are most willing to negotiate. Most first-time China-based entrants with a team of ten to twenty end up signing in this ring.

Ring three is Legaspi Village, structurally similar to Salcedo but quieter, more residential in mix, with a fair number of institutional and non-profit offices, and tighter parking.

Ring four is the CBD fringe, along Chino Roces, either side of Gil Puyat (Buendia), and out towards Magallanes and Pio del Pilar. Older commercial blocks, showrooms, car dealerships, printing and back-office space concentrate here. Value is genuinely better, but the spread in building standard, lift capacity, backup power and street presence is wide. It suits back-office teams, showrooms and offices with light storage attached.

One caution: the City of Makati is far bigger than the CBD. Poblacion, Guadalupe and the Cembo area carry a Makati address but are a different product entirely. Cheaper is not the same market. For how the residential side layers, see the four rings of Makati housing.

The Age Gap: Old Buildings Give You Area, New Towers Give You Systems

Treat building age as a cost structure question, not a style question. Because Makati was developed first, it carries a much higher share of older stock than any other Philippine business district, and that difference follows you through every month of the lease.

Older buildings, broadly the 1970s to 1990s generation, come with lower slab-to-slab heights that get tighter once your ceiling goes in; dense column grids that reduce the desks you can actually fit relative to the area you pay for; fewer and slower lifts, which you should time yourself during morning peak rather than take on trust; low parking ratios, so executive slots may need to be sourced separately; and building services built to older codes that tenants often upgrade at their own cost. The upsides are real too: lower asking rates, far more small units, and landlords, often local families or long-established institutions, who will negotiate clause by clause.

Newer towers offer zoned air conditioning, dual power feeds with full building generators, raised floors or planned cable routes, zoned lifts, complete access control and visitor management, and larger, more regular floor plates. You pay for it in both the base rate and the CUSA, and landlords generally use a standard lease they will not amend.

What to verify yourself on an inspection: finished ceiling height after fit-out; column positions and the desk count that actually fits, compared building to building by workstations rather than square metres; lift wait times at peak; the number of toilets per floor and their split; whether the generator reaches tenant outlets or only lifts and common areas; whether cooling is centralised or floor-controlled; and how many broadband carriers are already in the building, since older blocks often have exactly one, leaving you no leverage and no backup line.

How area and common charges are calculated is its own subject, covered in CUSA and rentable versus usable area. What you file before building out is in office fit-out permits.

Grade A, Grade B and PEZA-Accredited Floors

Makati is not uniformly tight. Good whole floors are tight; secondary and older stock is comparatively open. Start from a fact that trips up newcomers: the Philippines has no statutory office grading. Grade A and Grade B are broker and landlord conventions, and the same building can be marketed as either. Verify against hard attributes rather than the label.

The shape of supply matters more than the grade. Most large new office completions in recent years have landed in other business districts, because developable sites inside the Makati CBD are limited. At the same time the tenant base skews to banking, professional services and multinational headquarters, which are sticky and slow to move, so when a good whole floor comes back to the market it is often absorbed by a tenant relocating within the same few streets. The practical consequence is that Makati landlords tend to concede time and conditions rather than headline rate: longer rent-free fit-out periods, fit-out contributions, softer escalation. That is the opposite of districts carrying heavier vacancy, and it tells you where to spend your negotiating energy.

PEZA accreditation is the filter most first-timers miss. If you run IT-BPM style export services and intend to apply for ecozone-type fiscal treatment, your premises must sit in an accredited IT building or IT park floor. The key point is that accreditation attaches to the building, sometimes to specific floors, not to the city. Makati has a number of accredited buildings, but not every floor in one is necessarily inside the scope. Ask the landlord for the current accreditation document and get written confirmation that your specific floor and area are covered. Get this wrong and nothing downstream works. Background is in the PEZA ecozone guide, and the choice against the alternative route is in ecozone versus BOI incentives.

If you are still comparing cities rather than buildings, normalise the cost basis first using the four-city business cost comparison, or have the numbers built around your own model with market entry and site selection support.

The Lines in a Makati Lease That Cost Real Money

Makati runs the most institutionalised office market in the country, which means less room to negotiate and more damage from clauses you did not read. Deposit months, escalation conventions, VAT and withholding are common ground covered in commercial versus residential leases. What follows is what behaves differently in Makati specifically.

Term length. Bare-shell floors inside the CBD are generally offered on multi-year terms, justified by the landlord recovering fit-out and letting costs. If your business model is not settled, a long term usually costs more than the unit-rate saving it buys.

Rent-free fit-out period. Measured in months and negotiated against area and complexity. Ask precisely what is free. Most Makati landlords waive base rent only, while CUSA, after-hours aircon and electricity start running from the day your contractor enters. This is where first invoices routinely break the budget.

After-hours air conditioning. In a large share of Makati buildings, central cooling runs only during office hours, and evening or weekend use is billed by the hour at a rate and minimum charge set by the landlord. Any company running night shift, cross-time-zone support or weekend project work must pin down the rate, the minimum billable block and the request procedure before signing, and get it into the contract.

Restoration. On exit you return the floor to its handover condition, stripping partitions, flooring and services. Budget it inside your fit-out cost or your deposit disappears and you still owe money. Early exit economics are in breaking a lease early.

Payment mechanics. Many landlords ask for post-dated cheques covering the full term; understand the consequences of a bounced cheque first in post-dated cheques for rent.

Renewal. A renewal option normally carries a notice deadline, and missing it means renegotiating at the current asking rate; see negotiating a renewal. This is general information, not legal advice. Have your actual lease reviewed by a licensed Philippine lawyer.

Using a Makati Address as Your Registered Office

A Makati address moves smoothly through SEC registration and bank onboarding. The trade-off is a detail-heavy city hall process and local business taxes at the higher end of Metro Manila. A foreign company signing a lease has to satisfy three authorities, not just a landlord.

The SEC wants an address specific to floor and unit, not just a city. The BIR cares most about the premises genuinely existing and treats physical verification as routine. Makati City Hall will want the lease, the lessor's consent, and zoning and fire documentation when you apply for the business permit. Exactly which documents the landlord must hand over is covered in the landlord documents you need for a business permit.

Three things are specific to Makati. First, almost everything inside the CBD is already zoned commercial, so zoning mismatches are far rarer here than in mixed-use districts, and that is a genuine advantage of the address. Second, building management is unusually organised: documents come out on a clear process, but signage, fit-out approvals, visitor rules and service lift bookings are also enforced more strictly, so nothing gets done informally. Third, some upscale residential and mixed-use buildings will not accept company registration at all. Ask during the viewing rather than after signing.

Whether a virtual office works as a registered address depends on your industry, since licensed activities and inspection-driven sectors get a different answer from an ordinary consultancy. That question belongs to registered addresses and virtual offices.

Local business tax is the item most often left out of a site comparison. Philippine local business tax is set by each city, graduated on gross receipts and differentiated by line of business, and Makati sits in the higher band within Metro Manila. For a high-turnover, thin-margin trading company that can matter more than the per-square-metre difference between two buildings. See how to compare city costs. If your entity type is not settled, read representative office versus branch versus subsidiary before signing, because the entity determines who can sign at all.

Commute, Hiring Radius and the Alternatives by Stage

In Makati, your commute line determines who you can hire far more than your office does. That is especially true for entry-level and shift roles.

Commute reality. The CBD edge along EDSA has rail and a bus corridor, and the spine plus the two villages are walkable to each other. Once you take fringe space, staff need a transfer or a car. Plate-number coding shapes which days driving staff and visiting clients can come, see number coding rules, and real door-to-door times are in Manila peak hours. Few staff can afford to live in the CBD itself, so most junior employees commute from Cavite to the south, Rizal to the east or the north, which makes last-trip timing and personal safety a real constraint on night shifts. Shuttle budget is not something to discover after you open.

Talent. Makati has the deepest pool in the country for finance, audit, legal, banking, foreign-language customer support and senior administration, built up by decades of multinational churn within these few streets. The flip side is that competition is fiercest and salary benchmarks are set by multinationals. If you do not want to stand up an employing entity immediately, look at employer of record arrangements or compliant manpower dispatch.

Format by stage. One or two people running incorporation errands: solve the registered address properly and do not rush into a bare-shell lease. Two to ten people with the model still moving: a serviced office is the least painful, with CUSA, cleaning, internet and reception usually bundled and seats added on demand, at the cost of high per-head pricing and no ability to shape the space. Ten to thirty with a proven model: a private suite in a coworking centre, or a small bare-shell unit in secondary stock, is where the economics turn. Thirty or more, or any night-shift operation: bare shell with your own fit-out, negotiating after-hours cooling, backup power and lift access in one go. For seat-based operations, compare seat leasing against building your own.

Looking at other cities in parallel? Compare the rest of Metro Manila, Cebu and Clark. Site selection and accompanied viewings can be run with our market entry team.