Spurred by its strong sales performance in the first half of the year, property giant Ayala Land, Inc. (ALI) has increased its planned launches of residential units to "close to 12,000" from the original target of 9,275 units.

In an interview at the sidelines of the Real Estate Investment Trust's Summit, ALI chief finance officer Jaime Ysmael said the industry has become "quite good" with many developers launching a lot of projects” as “everybody accelerated because of good take up."

In the case of ALI, Ysmael said “we already upped our launch target to close to 12,000 from 9,275 due to the good take up. In the offices, the expansion continues, (and) we have been accelerating to a certain extent."

ALI president Antonino Aquino said earlier that product launches had already hit around 6,000 units as of the first half of the year as demand continues to grow from local buyers while the overseas Filipinos market has begun to recover.

Ysmael said the higher number of launches may push the firm’s capital expenditures up to record levels, higher than the original target of P27 billion. However, he said they will not need to raise fresh capital as the incremental increase in capex can be handled by the cashflow generated by the company's launches — or pre-selling revenues.

ALI is currently putting together mature assets it plans to list through a REIT vehicle. It has tapped as underwriters for the REIT investment banks JPMorgan and UBS for the foreign offering while BPI Capital is the local counterpart.

Ysmael said assets qualified for the firm’s REIT include office spaces, malls and hotels although they will probably not include hotels and the focus will be mainly malls.

He said they will be including "assets that have been existing for some time, and is already stable, with a certain level of occupancy rate... one that has a stable earnings."