In her 30-year career at Robinsons Land Corp., Ma. Socorro “Mybelle” Aragon-GoBio, Senior Vice-President and General Manager for the Robinsons Industrial and Integrated Developments and Robinsons Logistix and Industrials divisions, has seen it all.
Since joining the real estate development arm of JG Summit Holdings in 1993, Mybelle has been instrumental in the development of high-rise office towers, residential buildings, destination estates, and large-scale industrial facilities, just to name a few.
As part of the team behind the JG Summit website, I regularly come across articles documenting these projects overseen by Mybelle, accompanied by photos where she’s usually the lone female in the group, typically shot at a construction site.
So, with Mybelle being in an industry that’s perceived to be dominated by men, I thought this might be a good angle to focus on for this interview. I came prepared with questions about her being a successful female leader, her opinions on heads of state such as Jacinda Ardern and Sanna Marin, the former prime ministers of New Zealand and Finland, respectively, and other “girl power” topics.
Mybelle, who describes herself as gender blind, was having none of it. “That’s not the first time I’ve been asked that,” she says. “When I'm asked my thoughts on leadership, it's always qualified by ‘how does it feel to be a female leader?’ I find that strange because, one, men are never asked ‘How does it feel to be a male leader?’ Second, I’ve never felt that there was any kind of glass ceiling for myself or even for the other women in Robinsons Land. Now, if you were to ask me how I am as a leader, then I can answer the question more easily. For me, it's all about performance, it's about meritocracy.”
I quickly gathered that having a gender-based discussion wasn’t going to be Mybelle’s cup of tea and proceeded to skip most of the questions on the topic, although I managed to squeeze in one. Can women have it all? I asked and got the expected reply. “Yes, of course!” began Mybelle with absolute conviction, before adding with a sly chuckle: “And so can men.”
Three Decades of Building Dreams
According to a survey conducted by the website careerbuilder.com in 2021, the typical Gen Z employee stays in a job for just over two years – quite a contrast from the 30 years that Mybelle has clocked in at Robinsons Land. (For the record, Mybelle is part of Gen X, who, on average, will spend about 5.2 years in a job before moving on.)
There are a number of factors behind her lengthy stint in RLC, but we especially liked the heartwarming story Mybelle shared involving her father, former NBI Director Atty. Antonio D. Aragon; the founder of the Gokongwei Group, John Gokongwei Jr.; and the current JG Summit Chairman, James Go.
As Mybelle tells it, her father had very high expectations after her graduation from Ateneo de Manila University with a degree in Management Engineering. “At the time, most graduating students wanted to join three companies: Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and San Miguel. I was actually already hired by San Miguel, but I joined Robinsons Land. My Dad asked me what my pay was and, of course, being newly hired, it wasn’t that high, so I think he was a little disappointed. For a few months, he’d always ask, ‘Why don’t you find another job?’”
Then, after she had been with the company for about a year, her father was invited by Rafael “Paeng” Buenaventura, the president of PCIBank at the time, to attend a social function. During this period, the Gokongwei family was among the bank’s biggest shareholders, so Mr. John and Mr. James were also in attendance. “Right after the event, my dad went home and told me, ‘You know, I met Mr. Gokongwei and Mr. Go, and for some reason they know you, even though you’re new and you're young, because they said, ‘Oh, the tall girl.’”
Mybelle, who stands at five-feet-seven, continues her story. “My dad was amused and he seemed quite comforted by that. I’ll always remember what he said: ‘They are decent people. It’s a good company. Stay there.’” Regretfully, her father passed away not long after that conversation, but it’s likely that he would have been immensely proud to see the heights Mybelle has scaled since then.
Apart from heeding her father’s advice, Mybelle shares a few other reasons why she feels perfectly at home in RLC. “We have aligned values. I get intellectual stimulation from my job. I like the people working here. I like my boss [RLC President and CEO Frederick D. Go]. These are all very important to me, because at the end of the day, you have to be happy with what you're doing.”
Building with a Purpose
Part of RLC’s corporate mission narrates its commitment to “developing vibrant, delightful, and lasting real estate developments that create a catalyst for new opportunities and a better life.”
Up until the mid-2010s, this mission was carried out through five business units: the Commercial Centers Division, Office Buildings, Residential Buildings, Hotels and Resorts, and Horizontal Housing. Then, in 2016, RLC President and CEO Frederick D. Go divulged to Mybelle (at the time she was RLC’s Senior Vice-President for Robinsons Residences, Luxuria, Communities, and Right Homes) that he was looking for a growth driver for the business. “He wanted to set up a new division, particularly to look into Public-Private Partnership (PPP) potential opportunities, and he asked me to head it.”
The new department was initially called the Infrastructure and Integrated Developments Division. “The Infrastructure part of the name was supposed to represent the PPP projects, and then the Integrated Developments are the destination estates. Like I mentioned, RLC at the time had five main divisions, but then there are sites or properties where we have large enough landholdings where it is possible to integrate all the different components and put them together. That’s what I was tasked with.”
Mybelle explains that she was quite comfortable handling Integrated Developments because it was similar to part of her work in the residential side of the business. “In the Residential Group, I created an ad hoc team called the Joint Development Team where we got inputs from the different business units. When we were looking at RLC’s large landholdings, we listened to the various BUs, trying to figure out what we could put in those parcels of land. We already did a lot of synergizing, so it was easy to transition to the Integrated Developments part of the group.”
On the other hand, Mybelle had no previous experience in PPP projects, so handling the Infrastructure side wasn’t as simple at first. This, however, didn’t stop her from learning on the fly to meet company goals. “For me, not knowing anything about something is not an excuse. You can always educate yourself. You know how people say, ‘That's so hard, I can't understand it’? For me, I always try to simplify things. Like, when we were babies, we knew nothing. Then we learned our ABC’s. Once you figure it out, oh, it's simple lang pala. I try to apply that thinking to anything that I don't know about and I have to know. Never limit yourself. Never think that you're not smart enough or not good enough to learn something.”
With this gung-ho, can-do ethic, Mybelle set about forming a small working team to learn about the intricacies of Public-Private Partnerships. “We spent the next few months trying to educate ourselves on how things are done and what projects are available for us to pursue. We came up with a full list of projects that seemed exciting, from water to waste management, reclamation, railways, toll roads, and airports, we looked into things like that. From that list, we whittled it down to the projects which we felt we could deliver given the enterprise’s resources. That became the blueprint for the Infrastructure unit.”
A fine example of an RLC PPP project is a recently completed 20-story building on Julia Vargas Avenue in Pasig, which serves as the new headquarters of the Metro Manila Development Authority. “From not knowing anything in 2016, we now have sizable and substantial projects. I’m very proud of that,” says Mybelle.
Building Bigger and Better
Today, with the phenomenal growth of e-commerce in recent years, Robinsons Land is also banking on a recently spun off division, Robinsons Logistix and Industrials Incorporated (RLX), to ride on this exciting wave.
The property consulting firm JLL Philippines reports that the demand for Grade A and B logistics facilities is expected to be 3.06 million square meters by 2025 and 4.80 million square meters by 2030. Catering to this rapidly growing segment, RLX, which Mybelle leads, is focused on developing world-class, large-scale logistics facilities and industrial parks. These include distribution and fulfillment centers, cold storage facilities, and multi-story warehouses in strategic locations across the Philippines.
According to Mybelle, the origins of this promising new division came about rather serendipitously. “There was a property in Sucat, Muntinlupa, which was meant for a mall, but when our commercial centers group evaluated it, they said the area wasn't ready for a mall. So, it was left unutilized. One day, Ronnie Ong, who was with Robinsons Retail’s Supermarket Segment then, said he was looking for a warehouse for the group. I immediately thought of this property. I thought, we’re building condominiums, we’re building offices, we’re building malls. How hard is it to build a warehouse, right?”
Though building warehouses wasn’t part of her group’s mandate, she proposed the idea to Robinsons Land’s executive committee and secured their approval. “It was a no-brainer. If we have the competence to build more complicated developments, for sure, what is it to figure out how to do a warehouse? Also, operationally, it's the most efficient because you build it and then it's 100% leasable. So far, we’ve gotten very good yields and the ExCom agreed to grow the business, and we've been building a lot of warehouses since then.”
In her varied portfolio of projects, it’s this segment that Mybelle seems the most excited to talk about, especially regarding its opportunities for expansion. “There are a lot of warehouses in the market, but there are not a lot of Grade A warehouses. We're differentiating ourselves from the usual bodegas. We use international standards so logistics companies, the 3PLs [third-party logistics, the specialist companies that provide a range of distribution, storage, transport and fulfillment services to customers], they are among our main clients. Of course, we're also serving the needs of our Gokongwei Group affiliates, such as Robinsons Retail and URC.”
With Robinsons Land’s vast landholdings across the country, RLX has the golden opportunity to scale up its geographic coverage. Currently RLX has warehouse facilities in Sucat, Calamba, two in Pampanga (RLX Mexico and RLX San Fernando), and Sierra Valley in Cainta, Rizal. Opening soon is the RLX Industrial Park at Montclair Destination Estate in Porac, Pampanga. According to Mybelle, more are in the pipeline. “We're setting our sights on other growth areas within Luzon and also the Visayas and Mindanao. So, there’s huge potential for growth in the logistics business. It's an exciting industry to be in.”
She’s equally upbeat about the prospects of the Integrated Developments segment. To date, she’s led the development of three destination estates: Bridgetowne, which straddles parts of Pasig and Quezon City; Sierra Valley in Cainta, Rizal; and the largest, Montclair, a sprawling 216-hectare property in Porac, Pampanga. “For Integrated Developments, it’s also quite exciting for us, as there's always a clamor for fully integrated, sustainable, and delightful destination estates in the Philippines. I think there's also a lot of potential for growth there, as we level up to the standards of other countries.”
Looking at what the division espousing the holistic “Live, Work, Play, Inspire” lifestyle has been able to deliver in just a few years, Mybelle shares, “I’m very proud of what we’ve done with our Destination Estates, because with the creation of our business unit, we were able to further leverage on the strength of the company and have a highly diversified business, highlighting all our real estate development formats in a single space.”
Among her other pet projects, she also derived great satisfaction in packaging joint-ventures with international conglomerates, such as the Shangri-La Group and Jardine Matheson Group’s Hongkong Land, for the development of premier residential condominiums in RLC’s estate holdings. She describes these projects as "very fulfilling" as they stand as testaments to these firms’ confidence in the company’s track record and its ability to develop world-class projects.
Projects for the People and the Nation
Asked what she believes will be a looming threat in the industry, Mybelle reveals, “Each market segment would have its own set of challenges. But what will be common among them – and I think will continue to be a challenge – would be trying to balance the costs side of the business. Input costs keep rising, from construction materials to labor, it will always be a challenge to balance affordability with quality.”
This is very much tied in with how she views the importance of sustainability in real estate development, especially after the pandemic. “It really changed how people think about sustainability,” shares Mybelle. “To a large extent, it really underscored the need for a more focused approach on sustainability. So, how you marry real estate development and sustainability is really having the mindset of wanting to provide long-term value to stakeholders, from promoting efficient land use to putting in all the components necessary for us to be a responsible developer, and looking at the environmental impact of our projects. It's always about having the stakeholders in mind.”
In fulfilling an important part of Robinsons Land’s mission, that of creating developments that provide “a catalyst for new opportunities and a better life,” Mybelle opines that the company is a major contributor to sustainable economic growth, “providing facilities or quality developments and investing in infrastructure for nation building.”
This is of particular interest to the Industrial and Integrated Developments division, which, through its PPP projects, aims to help the national government as well as local government units toward the improvement of social services and other aspects in the daily lives of citizens.
Citing an ongoing project that involves the development of a township and the construction of a world-class mall, convention facility, and hotel in partnership with an LGU, Mybelle shares, “It is really upgrading the lives of the constituents where we build, and then it also enables or makes it possible for the government to deliver quality projects to the people that they serve. We’re here to do our part in nation building.” — Pierre A. Calasanz
For more information on Robinsons Land's Industrial and Integrated Developments Division, visit robinsonsland.com/industrial-and-integrated-developments-division or leave a message at rlxwarehouse.leasing@robinsonsland.com.
