Some time ago, I met a condo buyer who told me he spent weeks obsessing over floor plans, stack orientations, and even fortune teller consultations over the better unit for his one-bedder.
He finally settled on the perfect unit: high floor, greenery view, and in the block closest to the side gate for MRT and mall access. He balloted for it under the placement system. He didn’t get it.
And that was that. No fallback, no pivot. The unit went to someone else, and he went home feeling like he had played a game with only one move and lost.
That’s the trade-off with the placement system, which some developers have started using at new launches. On paper, it is neater and simpler to understand; but it can be less forgiving than the more common balloting system.
In the usual balloting process, buyers register interest and are assigned a queue number. When their number…
