Professionalisation or Hybridisation? Real Estate Brokers in Metro Cebu, the Philippines, during the Boom of the 1990s

Abstract

This paper addresses a gap in the literature about the effect of the late 20th-century property boom on real estate practitioners in a developing country city in the context of enhanced global integration. Taking a process approach, it examines professionalisation within the brokers' sector in Metro Cebu, the Philippines, by pairing theories on the sociology of professions on one hand and insights from economic sociology and studies of globalisation and local transformations on the other. It is argued that professionalisation initiated by local realtor boards and, to a certain degree, supported by major national property firms with international partners was a social closure, creating opportunities for monopoly for the licensed brokers, while marginalising the unlicensed. As part of their strategy, its advocates employed delegitimising discourses. Certain historical and locality-specific factors, however, seriously constrained it-namely: state weakness in bureaucratic regulation, the indispensability of local knowledge in brokering, the dominant bargaining characteristics of land transactions and clients' greater power in the market over licensed providers. What flourished instead were hybridised brokering networks and partnerships comprised of both professional and unlicensed agents, demonstrating the point that there is nothing intrinsically incompatible between informality, modernisation and a high-performing property market.