You know the drill: Find the most central location. Check out the nearest schools or malls. Evaluate its accessibility to transportation. Pick a place where everything is a stone’s throw away.

Homebuyers have been following this mantra for quite some time now, but with how the world is changing, it’s about time to rethink the formula for finding the best location for you and your family.

Formula 1: Assess Present vs. Future Value

If you decide to drive around a neighbourhood, you will instantly get a picture of the kind of life it can offer you. Although visualizing is a good way of gauging a location’s potential, it is also limiting you to other possibilities.

Homebuyers today need to stop looking at the current status of a certain location and start paying attention to the future of it. Just because a neighbourhood is thriving right now, doesn't mean it’s still going to be in five years. Likewise, just because a neighbourhood looks drab right now, doesn’t mean it can’t thrive in the next five years. So the best question to ask always is ‘where will this neighbourhood be in five or ten years?”

Formula 2: Redefine Accessibility

Because of our obsession with accessibility, there’s no need to wonder why Metro Manila has once ranked 4th in the “World’s Densest City” in 2017 by UN’s Habitat Data. So if you’re choosing a permanent home for your family, you need to be more critical in weighing what matters most.

The advent of promising technologies in logistics, lifestyle, education, and even work are now seen as great equalizers especially for people who prefer living in the outskirts or even off-grid locations. Also, there are more and more city centers sprouting outside Metro Manila that open up new economies and opportunities. Today, access to everything is possible wherever you choose to live.

So if you are to redefine accessibility in choosing your home’s location, it should be access to an excellent quality of life rather than access to good things.

Formula 3: Neighbourhood Matters

In a policy research brief by MacArthur Foundation in 2014, they came up with findings on the link between neighborhood and family life. One of the insights is that a chronically stressful neighborhood that is dangerous, chaotic, and rundown can seep through parenting styles, which can in turn affect children. This only shows how critical a neighbourhood is to a family’s well-being.

In the Philippines, we often downplay stressful environments such as traffic, noise, and crowds as part of everyday life without really knowing its impact on us and our family. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should completely abandon city life and live off-grid. The right mindset is to find a neighbourhood that can safeguard you against these stressors may it be a master-planned condo community in the city or a suburban location.

To learn about available real estate projects in the country’s top locations, check out recent properties available on OnePropertee.