For the purpose of attending to various problems involving private real estate arising from the formulation and execution of the planning of the City of Manila by the National Urban Planning Commission, there is hereby created a Real Property Board to be composed of three members who shall be appointed by the President. The Chairman of the Board shall be chosen from the Office of the Assessor of the City of Manila; one member from the Bureau of Lands and the remaining member from the Manila Realty Board. There shall be among the members of the Board a lawyer possessing sufficient knowledge and experience in matters pertaining to real estate. The Board shall have the following functions:

1. To gather all available data relative to lands of the public or private domain of the National Government and those of the City of Manila, including actually abandoned rights-of-way of existing streets and those proposed to be abandoned, which lands may be exchanged with privately owned lots needed for public purposes in connection with the planning of the City of Manila;

2. To gather the existing assessed values and to ascertain the market values of such government-owned lands as are mentioned in the next preceding paragraph hereof, and to consider all factors affecting the proper appraisal of the lots proposed to be exchanged or to be purchased;

3. To conduct the necessary negotiations leading to the acquisition of privately owned lands by exchange or purchase, and to recommend, through the National Urban Planning Commission, to the President the expropriation of any of such lands when all efforts at extra-judicial acquisition thereof fail.

The Committee is hereby empowered to call upon any department, bureau, office, dependency, agency or instrumentality of the government for such assistance, data and information as it may need in carrying out its functions. For this purpose, it shall have access to, and the right to examine, the books, documents, papers or records thereof, as well as the books, documents, papers or records of such private party, firm, corporation, business house or enterprise as may be affected by, or interested in, the exchange, expropriation, purchase and sale of any private land in connection with the execution of the planning of the City of Manila.

The Committee shall proceed at once in accordance with the provisions of this Order and shall submit to the National Urban Planning Commission a report of its work from time to time, or as the circumstances of each case may require.

Done at the City of Manila, this 12th day of July, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, and of the Independence of the Philippines, the second.


By the President:

(Sgd.) EMILIO ABELLO
Chief of the Executive Office