‘Profit Above Peace’ Policy at SMDC Condos Eats Away at Residents’ Health

Have you been considering purchasing an SMDC condo unit? As one of the top developers in Metro Manila, there are many to choose from, I’m sure you’ve heard of them, and they are easy to find, since they are similarly themed: Jazz Residence, Light Residence, Grass Residence, Green Residence, Shore Residence, Blue Residence, Fern Residence, and more. You can find a list of them all here: https://condolivingbysmdc.com/properties.

If you are considering purchasing, or even renting a SMDC condo unit long-term, please consider this as a warning from a resident owner who has made this mistake, and has experienced constant disruption of her life ever since.

In order to maximize profit, SMDC is constantly buying back units from the bank for which owners have defaulted on their payments, and then SMDC renovates or “refreshes” these units to make them ready to be sold again. In this way, SMDC makes double, triple, quadruple, or more profits on the SAME unit because it is sold more than once. The “refreshing” basically involves replacing the tiles on the floor. Rather than having them professionally cleaned, SMDC chooses to replace all the floor tiles in the unit and on the balconies for every repossessed unit as an inexpensive way to make the unit seem new again. As you might, or might not know, replacing tiles is one the noisiest and most disturbing renovation processes that can be done. It involves constant hammering for several hours a day, every day, for weeks or months to break up each individual tile and remove it. And these very disturbing noisy works are a never-ending process within all SMDC Residences because their units are constantly being defaulted on and repossessed by SMDC, “refreshed”, and put back on the market. The renovation and more importantly, the NOISE… NEVER STOPS.

Now imagine that you work from home, as many people do now, and trying to work with constant hammering noises in the background. Or maybe your clients are in the U.S. so you begin work at night, maybe around 10:00pm, and you finish up 6:00am or 7:00am, then after eating and unwinding from your work, you might fall asleep around 8:00am or 9:00am. Ideally, you would sleep until about 5:00pm to get the recommended eight hours of sleep that you need to function properly and maintain good health. However, at 10:00am, just ONE hour after you fall asleep, you’re violently ripped from your sleep by what sounds like someone hammering directly on your ceiling. The hammering noises never let up for two hours until 12:00pm noon, not even for a few seconds. It is a constant BANG BANG BANG BANG hammering that, after only a few minutes starts to feel like someone is actually hammering on your head. You can’t avoid getting a terrible headache and it feels like a type of torture, where someone is relentlessly disrupting your chance at any peace and quiet or a decent sleep. After 30 minutes, your body becomes very tense, your headache becomes a migraine, and you realize that you will not be able to sleep until the noise stops.

It stops at 12:00pm noon due to the rules regarding noisy works (they are only allowed from 10am to 12pm and 3pm to 5pm on weekdays), and you can finally relax, and around 1:00pm, you are able to doze off back to sleep. You get two hours sleep and are then violently awakened again by the hammering at 3:00pm. You lay awake until 5:00pm listening to the constant hammering (because there is no escape unless you go out of your unit), and your headache intensifies. At 5:00pm, it’s already time to start your day and prepare for work later in the evening. You barely got any sleep. This scenario repeats itself day in and day out, every weekday for the entire week, and lasts for over a month. Then it suddenly stops. The job is finished. And you begin again to remember what it’s like to have some peace and quiet in your home again, you get some good sleep, and start to feel good and healthy again. And then…one morning, at exactly 10:00am, BANG BANG BANG BANG, there it is again. It’s back. Another unit is being “refreshed” nearby and the torture starts all over again. And again. And again. I have lived in an SMDC condo unit for several years now, and I am warning you: the noise never stops.

Even if you do not work from home, or you do not work at night, the noise is still unsettling and adds an element of anxiety and constriction to your day. If you have kids, you can watch their angelic sleeping/dreaming faces become twisted into crying when the hammering starts and deal with their fussy behavior the rest of the day. In fact, your whole family will be trying to function amidst continuous hammering, and with terrible headaches every day until the work is finished. Even worse is that the workers that SMDC hires often do not follow the noisy works schedule. They will ignore the rules of the residence and start hammering at 8:00am in the morning, or they won’t stop at 12:00pm as they are supposed to, or they will stop and begin again too early at 1:00pm or 2:00pm, rather than waiting until 3:00pm as defined by the rules for the residence. Individual unit owners who break these rules and do noisy works at the wrong times are subject to a fine, but when SMDC is working on a unit, it can do what it wants without penalty.

Now let me take a moment to explain why this is not a minor issue effecting only a few people at a time. On the contrary, a large amount of people and families are effected by these noisy disruptions all at the same time. That is because of the way SMDC develops it’s units and the cheaper materials they use. The hammering from the tile replacement reverberates loudly throughout many units even if they are not directly beside the unit being renovated, and the sound is so loud that it sounds like the hammering is in a unit directly above, below, or beside you.

Our most recent bad experience was from a renovation being done two units over and two units above us, and it was loud enough to wake us from a deep sleep, and loud enough to give us all terrible headaches. It was not a unit directly beside us, but it was loud, and we could even feel the vibrations when we touch our wall. If you make a quick diagram and put the unit being renovated in the center, and add two units above, below, and beside all around it, then you can estimate that AT LEAST 24 units are being heavily disturbed by these noisy works at the same time for each ONE unit being “refreshed” by SMDC. During one period, in the span of seven months, we experienced four units, all being renovated by SMDC (we know it was by SMDC because SMDC was listed as the owner on the work permit posted on the door of those units, and the Greenmist PMO head of engineering confirmed it), so it was almost continuous disruptive noise for the entire seven months, and during this time, our health, our moods, and our lives deteriorated greatly because of the lack of sleep and the constant noise.

Is it legal for SMDC to have a deal with the bank to unceasingly re-buy and re-sell defaulted condo units? Probably. I can’t imagine they would be so bold as to openly break the law. But is it ETHICAL to do so? That’s another thing entirely. They advertise a peaceful life to retirees or new families with babies and they sell units to owners who expect a certain basic level of comfort for themselves or their tenants, and in reality this is lie. SMDC prioritizes it’s own profit over the peacefulness of the residence, and it puts it’s own financial interests above anything else, that is the bottom line. You might think you are buying a home, but what you are really buying is a plot of space on a construction site that never ends.