Making the hard sale: Migrant sales agents and the precarious labours of Philippine real estate brokerage

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have taken interest in the significant remittance contributions of Filipinos living and working abroad to what some have called the Philippine ‘real estate boom’. In the case of real estate property as investment, however, much remains unknown with regards to how major Philippine real estate developers capture, facilitate and ensure the continuous flow of migrant investments into condominium units in the Philippines. This article examines how Philippine real estate developers make use of a particular kind of sales labour to reach various Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) populations. It argues that most major developers rely on a hierarchical, networked and transnationalized labour arrangement, composed mainly of licensed and unlicensed sales agents. Drawing from interviews with sales agents working in and between the cities of Metro Manila and Dubai, it then complicates dominant depictions of real estate sales agents by demonstrating the precarious conditions they work under as well as how this flexible labour arrangement often works in two ways. First, this article demonstrates that through their sales labour, specific Filipino migrant community dynamics such as community leadership, charity and other migrant ‘life projects’ such as investments, side hustles and debt get absorbed into the very circuitry of real estate accumulation. Second, through sales agents’ recruitment of OFW ‘marketing partners’, Philippine real estate developers are able to enter and expand into spaces of migrant advocacy and of migrant in/formal work to enrol OFWs either as potential investors, as labour or both.