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The way we started was not planned but has developed through the years as our main source of income and keeping our energy levels high before and during each new building project. We take off on travel adventures between projects so we're able to constantly stimulate our guests sharing our excitement about both our travel experiences and projects with them. Positive energy is magnetic and helps draw people to one another and inject life into people suffering from a low, depressed period of their lives. In a poor country like the Philippines optimism and such positive thinking is rare and a constant challenge. My lovely wife, Lorna, and I depend on and help each other maintain such attitudes.

We'd been living and doing business in Hong Kong when we bought our first townhouse unit on Roxas Blvd near the airports in March 1985 after enjoying phenomenal profits in 1984. We rented it out until 1988 when we decided to stay in the Philippines and moved into our unit. While watching TV in our living room we felt something odd, looked over our shoulders and found over a dozen kids standing just outside our steet-side wall staring through our large window at our TV; we didn't like it so needed to do something to stop it so we asked around to find someone who could raise the hollow concrete block wall another meter and at the same time raise the dividing wall between us and our neighbor and put some concrete plant boxes in our very small garden area beside our driveway.

We found one of the guys who'd been working for the builder of the 54 unit Villa Carolina Townhouse complex and he gave us an estimate of what it would cost with labor and materials; it was only about U$50 and seemed really cheap to us considering we'd paid U$30,500 for our townhouse unit. We watched them work and asked them about building a bedroom above our "dirty kitchen" ( considered a second kitchen for cooking with charcoal and a laundry area always located behind the main frame of houses in the Philippines ) 2 meter wide area in the back of our unit and a gound floor tiled water tank. This project took a little longer but cost only about U$1200. As we watched them work and ordered the building materials they needed we had a new project idea. We wanted a very stong structure built above our driveway with the stairway being between it and the main frame of our house with another bedroom and concrete slab sundeck roof on top. This required 4 strong foundation posts and concrete beam structure made with 16mm steel bar and we could visualize what building larger structures required. By the time we finished this structure we were getting excited about the endless possibilities since the total cost of this structure was about U$2000; our natural entrepreneurial instincts were aroused when thinking what we'd paid for a 3 bedroom, 2 bath unit and only 10% of that amount for 2 extra bedrooms.

Then we bought a small 39 sqm condominium apartment in VM Towers, a building converted from a hotel to an apartment building. The apartment space was delivered as rough and unfinished with the buyers expected to finish it. So this little project kept our minds on building and thinking about future prospects we could pursue that might excite us.

In the summer of 1989, we went down to Boracay to sell a beachfront property in Diniwid, Lorna had owned since 1979, just north of the main white sand beach. A new chain of events occured which led us to planning to build a beach house /resort on Boracay, a project idea which started small and continued to grow beyond our capabilities. This is when we bought the "Construction Estimate" book from National Book Store for less than $3 and Bill and Lorna became "owner contractors".

Boracay Business Center Real Estate

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