The Philippines is moving toward a predominantly urban society

Global urbanization is entering a slower but more complex phase, and the Philippines is moving steadily toward a predominantly urban society that will be shaped by how well it manages its fast-growing cities. The World Urbanization Prospects 2025 (WUP 2025) combines new satellite-based data on built-up areas with improved population modeling, giving a sharper picture of where and how people are concentrating in cities, towns, and rural areas worldwide.

What WUP 2025 shows globally

WUP 2025 confirms that the share of people living in urban areas continues to rise, but the speed of urban growth is slowing compared with the explosive expansion of the late 20th century. Growth is increasingly concentrated in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Asia and Africa, where a relatively small group of countries will account for most of the increase in city dwellers to 2050.

A major innovation in WUP 2025 is its harmonized “Degree of Urbanization” approach, which classifies cities, towns and rural areas using consistent thresholds for population density, size, and contiguity instead of relying solely on differing national definitions. This revision expands coverage to more than 12,000 urban centers of at least 50,000 inhabitants, allowing more granular estimates of city growth and the links between population, land use and built-up expansion.

Urbanization trends that matter

Several global patterns stand out. Cities’ built-up footprints have expanded roughly twice as fast as the world’s population since the 1970s, which means many urban areas are growing outwards faster than they are growing upwards, with implications for transport, infrastructure costs and environmental pressure. At the same time, many countries are seeing the emergence of dense small and medium cities that absorb much of new urban growth, rather than only a handful of megacities.

Future global urban growth will be heavily concentrated: just a few countries will account for over half of the nearly 1 billion additional city residents expected between 2025 and 2050, led by India, Nigeria, Pakistan and others in Africa and South Asia. This concentration raises the stakes for planning, since decisions in these rapidly urbanizing countries will strongly influence climate risk, resource use and inequality worldwide.

Where the Philippines is today

According to recent estimates that draw on the WUP series, around half of the Philippine population is now urban: about 49 to 50 per cent, or roughly 57 to 58 million people out of a total population of around 117 million in 2025. Urban growth remains positive but moderate, with annual urban population growth reported at about 1.5 per cent in 2024, which is faster than urban growth in many high-income countries but slower than in some of the fastest-growing African and South Asian nations.

The country’s urban system is dominated by the Manila urban agglomeration, whose wider built-up metropolitan area is estimated in the mid‑2020s at over 15 million residents, making it one of Asia’s largest megacities. But WUP 2025’s lower 50,000‑person threshold also highlights the growing importance of secondary and emerging cities across Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, many of which are expanding in population and land area even if they remain far smaller than Metro Manila.

Snapshot: global vs Philippines (circa 2025)

Indicator (approximate)	World (2025)	Philippines (2025)
Urban share of population	About 56–60% living in urban areas.	About 49–50% living in urban areas.
Urban population growth	Slowing globally but still positive, concentrated in Asia and Africa.	Urban growth around 1.5% per year (2024 data as latest benchmark).
Settlement pattern	Rapid expansion of built-up areas, many small and medium cities growing.	One dominant megacity region (Manila) plus a network of fast-growing regional cities.

Key messages for the Philippines

First, the Philippines is on track to become predominantly urban in the coming decades, so planning for an urban majority is no longer optional; it is a demographic certainty. This means national and local policy must treat housing, transport, water, and social services in cities as core development priorities rather than afterthoughts, especially as climate risks like flooding and heat are amplified in dense urban environments.

Second, the pattern of growth matters as much as the pace. WUP 2025’s evidence that global built-up areas are expanding faster than population suggests the Philippines faces real risks from unmanaged sprawl around Metro Manila and other rapidly urbanizing corridors. Compact, transit‑oriented development, strict protection of high‑risk zones, and better coordination between land-use and infrastructure planning will be essential to avoid locking in congestion, high transport costs and vulnerability to disasters.

Third, secondary cities are an opportunity. With WUP 2025 now tracking thousands of smaller urban centers, the data underscore that dispersing economic growth into well‑connected regional hubs can ease pressure on Manila while improving access to jobs and services outside the capital. Strategic investment in mid‑sized Philippine cities—particularly in resilient infrastructure, digital connectivity and human capital—can create alternative growth poles that absorb population growth more sustainably.

Finally, urban policy and climate policy are increasingly the same agenda. The concentration of people and assets in Philippine cities means that progress on emissions reduction, climate adaptation, and disaster risk management will depend on how urban expansion is guided and how existing neighborhoods are upgraded. Using the richer spatial and demographic detail of WUP 2025 alongside national data can help identify hotspots where investments in resilient, inclusive urban development will yield the greatest long‑term dividends.

Source: Ziggurat Real Estate

Google Listings Aren’t a Threat to Home Stocks

Housing technology companies are offering far more than just online listings—and those expanded services act as a buffer against disruptions in the residential real estate market.

A turf war over the online home listings business has been brewing for some time. Then Google entered the fray.

As part of a pilot program, the search giant began placing home listings at the top of certain Google search results. News that Google might push deeper into home listings sent shockwaves through the stocks of companies that currently dominate the space.

On December 15, after reports of Google’s test spread over the weekend on social media, Zillow Group’s market value dropped by about $1.5 billion. Shares of CoStar Group, the parent company of Homes.com, fell to their lowest level in more than three years. Neither stock has fully recovered since.

The selloff, however, appears unwarranted.

A Small Experiment, Not a Market Takeover

There is no indication that Google’s home listings feature will see a broad rollout. The test itself is limited in scope: listings have appeared only for mobile users in select cities such as San Francisco and Miami. A Google spokesperson described it to Barron’s as “a small experiment,” without specifying when it began or how long it would last.

Wall Street analysts largely agree that investors overreacted. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has previously experimented with home listings—efforts that ultimately faded away. Still, as Benchmark analyst Daniel Kurnos put it, “No one likes it when an 800-pound gorilla comes sniffing around.”

The episode reflects deeper anxieties about disruption in the housing technology sector, driven not only by Google but also by the rise of artificial intelligence. Agents told Barron’s they are already receiving increasing referrals—of mixed quality—from AI-driven chat platforms.

More disruption is coming, and companies are preparing for it.

Listings Are Only One Piece of the Business

Major housing platforms—Zillow, Rocket’s Redfin, and CoStar’s Homes.com—are no longer just house-browsing websites. Each has expanded into adjacent services that help insulate them from changes in how buyers search for homes and how agents advertise.

Realtor.com, which also operates a listings platform, is owned by Barron’s parent company, News Corp.

Among the big players, analysts say Zillow’s core business appears the most insulated from increased competition, thanks to strong organic traffic and brand recognition. According to web traffic measurement firm Semrush, Zillow is the most-viewed real estate website in the United States.

In recent years, Zillow has pivoted away from relying primarily on agent listing marketing. Instead, its main sources of growth now come from mortgage services and rental listings. The company also offers agent-focused products such as workflow management software and seller-oriented listing tools.

“The combination of the business that we’ve built is far more diversified than it was five years and 10 years ago,” Zillow Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Hofmann said at a December technology conference.

Benchmark’s Kurnos rates Zillow’s Class A stock a Buy, with a $95 price target—nearly 40% above its recent price of $68.54. “To think that Google would somehow displace the most complete end-to-end solution in the marketplace with the strongest and stickiest agent product suite seems rather far-fetched,” he wrote.

Homes.com and CoStar’s Long Game

CoStar’s Homes.com was positioned as an agent-friendly alternative to dominant listing sites, focusing on services for sellers’ agents rather than lead generation. CoStar acquired Homes.com in 2021 and announced its aggressive expansion with a Super Bowl commercial in 2024.

Usage has grown since then—but so has spending. CoStar’s marketing budget reached $1.36 billion in 2024, up from $684 million in 2022. That surge in spending has weighed on earnings, contributing to stock declines. CoStar shares are down 26% since the Friday before the 2024 Super Bowl and fell another 6% in 2025.

Homes.com remains a relatively new arm of CoStar’s broader commercial real estate business, which includes data analytics software and marketing platforms. Fears of technological disruption have only added to recent pressure on the stock.

Still, CoStar is betting heavily on innovation. According to CEO Andy Florance, 50% of Homes.com’s software development is now focused on artificial intelligence. “AI offers transformative opportunities to unlock tremendous value in real estate,” he said on an October earnings call.

Rocket, Redfin, and Vertical Integration

Rocket, one of the largest mortgage originators in the U.S., made a major move into listings with its 2025 acquisition of Redfin. By the third quarter, more than one in ten of Rocket’s retail loan closings came from customers who used both Redfin and Rocket, CEO Varun Krishna said. “We expect this to only increase,” he added.

Even if competition intensifies or demand for listings portals weakens, Rocket maintains a dominant position in mortgage origination and servicing. Its $14.2 billion all-stock acquisition of loan servicer Mr. Cooper brought an estimated one in six U.S. mortgages under the combined companies’ management.

That refinancing opportunity is one of the reasons Rocket’s stock surged 72% in 2025.

A More Competitive—but Stronger—Ecosystem

For real estate professionals, increased competition may ultimately be beneficial. Wendy Monday, a broker at Nashville-based Onward Real Estate, says she currently advertises on Zillow but is watching Google’s experiment closely.

“The more platforms there are,” she said, “the sharper their tools all have to be.”

For now, Google’s test looks less like a threat—and more like a reminder that housing technology companies have evolved well beyond simple listings.

Source: Barrons

New Megacities Lie in the Path of Devastating Floods

Cyclone Ditwah brought Sri Lanka’s most damaging flooding in 20 years.

 Humanity’s future lies in some of the most vulnerable spots on the planet.

We’ve seen that in stark relief of late. A United Nations report last month concluded that the world’s population is increasingly crowded into a group of often low-lying, middle-income megacities in Asia and Africa.

Jakarta and Dhaka dethroned Tokyo’s long-held status as the world’s biggest city, with 42 million, 37 million and 33 million people respectively.1Mexico City and Sao Paulo were overtaken by Shanghai and Cairo among the global top 10. Bangkok, Delhi, Karachi, Lagos, Luanda and Manila were some of the fastest growing among metropolises of more than 10 million.

Many of these very regions have been hit by a devastating run of floods in recent weeks. The monsoon belt from Southeast Asia to West Africa is at the same time the swath of the globe that is urbanizing fastest, and the one where catastrophic rainfall is set to increase most dramatically. Nearly 1,000 people have been killed in a wave of storms that have stretched from Sri Lanka to Vietnam, with more than 442 dead in the north of Indonesia’s Sumatra island and at least 160 fatalities in southern Thailand.

Cities of the Future

The world's fastest-growing urban areas are mostly in Asia

Such disastrous events are hardly unprecedented. Most of our earliest civilizations grew up along inundation-prone river valleys, as evidenced by the near-universality of deluge myths. In the same rural areas of Southeast Asia that have been among the worst-hit by the rains of recent weeks, homes were traditionally built on stilts under steeply-pitched roofs to allow water to run away without doing harm. Local traditions often warn against building near wild rivers prone to bursting their banks.

The sophistication of this vernacular technology is under-appreciated, but — as with the more technical modelling that’s done to mitigate flash flooding in the modern urban environment — it’s inadequate to the challenges we’ll face as our planet warms.

With each degree that the local temperature rises, the atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture goes up by about 7%. That’s an immense amount when you consider that a cyclone can easily hold half a billion tons of water. Indigenous knowledge, like modern flood maps, is grounded in a historical understanding of how rainwater behaves — but the heating of our planet is making all those old predictions irrelevant.

The risks of this are greatest in the expanding megacities. The current rural population of about 1.5 billion will barely grow before heading into permanent decline in the 2040s, according to the UN, but two-thirds of population growth between now and 2050 will be in cities. About half of the billion new urbanites will be in just seven countries, most of them in the Asian and African monsoon belts: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.

Unlike rural-dwellers who can often site their settlements in more stable locations, city migrants rarely have much choice about where to live. That’s why so many shantytowns are built on land previously neglected as too risky, from the landslide-prone hillsides of Brazil’s favelas and Venezuela’s barrios to the swamps that gave rise to slums in Mumbai’s Dharavi, Bangkok’s Khlong Toei and Lagos’s Makoko.

Unequal Burden

Source: Rentschler et al., Flood exposure and poverty in 188 countries. Nat Commun 13, 3527 (2022)

Precious few of these places have the sort of wealth to handle the engineering challenges of weather-proofing their built environment. Out of 1.8 billion flood-threatened people worldwide, just 11% are in high-income countries.

Unlike famine and infectious disease, tragic urban floods are rarely the result of absolute poverty. Instead, they’re most often the outcome of development that’s failing to keep pace with the problems it brings in its wake — cities whose allure is drawing people in so fast that infrastructure is incapable of moving at the same speed. The most damaging flooding over the past week in Thailand was in Hat Yai, a bustling tourist and shopping destination close to the Malaysian border that’s home to a special economic zone and one of the country’s busiest airports. In Sri Lanka, the fast-growing capital Colombo was worst-hit.

That puts a grave responsibility on municipal and national governments. All are counting on cities as the engines of growth over coming decades, but they’ll need to work hard in the face of natural disasters that will perpetually threaten to tear apart the urban fabric. The great centers of India, straining under water shortages and choking urban pollution, show what can happen to a country when urbanization starts to fail.

Bringing fresh water and global connections with them, rivers and coastlines have long been the lifeblood of the world’s great cities. As rising seas and devastating floods now make those same places increasingly unlivable, we must confront the possibility that these life-giving attributes could be their doom as well.

Source: Bloomberg