LiveDavao Methodology
LiveDavao publishes practical guidance about living in Davao City. Figures on the site are tied to a source, a sampling window, and a review date wherever the data supports it. This page explains how.
The four-tier source hierarchy
Tier 1 — Government + utility primary sources. DLPC rate sheets, DCWD bulletins, DHSUD resolutions, BIR Revenue Regulations, DOLE Labor Advisories, PSA family income and expenditure surveys, LTFRB fare orders, PIA releases, the Davao City Engineer's Office, and lawphil.net for statute text. These get cited directly with a link and a sampling date.
Tier 2 — Verified institutional secondaries. Pag-IBIG Fund, OWWA, PhilHealth, BPI / BDO / UnionBank / Wise / Remitly rate cards, condo HOA dues schedules from named buildings, and PSA-derived sources like Numbeo's Philippine city indexes. These corroborate Tier 1 and fill gaps where no primary exists.
Tier 3 — Active listings + market observation. Lamudi, Dot Property, Rentpad, and Facebook Marketplace active listings across Lanang, Bajada, Matina-Ecoland, Bangkal, Toril, Buhangin, and Mintal, sampled when a guide is refreshed. Where we can, listings are cross-checked against landlord and condo-management quotes.
Tier 4 — Resident reporting. Ground-level observations from people living in Davao: palengke prices at Bankerohan, jeepney routes, flood depths reported after specific events, BPO commute realities around Concentrix Lanang, TaskUs Bajada, iQor Matina. Tier-4 figures are always labeled as observation, never as a published rate.
How prices appear on the site
- Every price is a timestamped range, never a single number. The range covers the realistic variation across the sampling window.
- Prices carry an explicit as of date shown beside the figure. If a figure has no timestamp visible, it is sourced from a Tier-1 government page linked in the paragraph.
- Where sample sizes are small (a niche barangay, a single condo's lease history) we say so in the same sentence.
- When a figure is a personal observation rather than a published rate, the article uses language like "based on observed listings" so a reader knows the difference.
Calculator methodology
Every Davao calculator ships with a methodology accordion that spells out the rate base, the math, the assumptions, and the uncertainty band. The DLPC electricity calculator, for example, uses the current published all-in residential rate and models inverter air conditioning at 60% of nameplate draw versus 85% for non-inverter units. The ±15% band absorbs month-to-month rate drift, appliance variance, and behavioral variance.
Calculators are updated when we notice the underlying rate has changed (DLPC and DCWD adjust monthly). The Tool page footer shows the last verification date, so you can see how current the math is.
Editorial review cadence
These are the review windows we aim for, not a promise — the last-updated date in each article's byline is the real signal of how current a figure is.
| Claim type | Review window |
|---|---|
| DLPC / DCWD rates | Monthly |
| Rent + vacancy data | Quarterly |
| NHSB rent cap (RA 9653) | Annually |
| Building / employer named specifics | Annually |
| Flood zone data | Every 18 months |
| Legal framework (RA 9653, BIR rules) | Every 2 years or on rule change |
Articles surfaced past their review window are flagged in the publishing pipeline and either updated or marked with a freshness disclaimer.
The Davao Living Cost Index
LiveDavao publishes its own quarterly Davao Living Cost Index — an original rental dataset, not a re-quote of crowdsourced figures. Each release states the things most cost sites hide:
- Sample size per segment. Every band shows its n. The April 2026 baseline covers 236 priced listings across six property segments, drawn from 281 observed Davao City listings.
- Collection window. An explicit reporting month, never "early 2026".
- Method. Asking rents sampled from named portals (Lamudi, Dot Property), reported as p25 / median / p75 with min–max range. Median is the headline; the long luxury tail is excluded from it deliberately.
- Limitations, stated up front. Asking rent runs above negotiated rent; a two-portal sample under-counts Facebook and word-of-mouth inventory; condos are over-represented. We say so on the page.
- Downloadable data + a fixed methodology. The dataset is published as CSV with a stable URL and refreshed every quarter, so any figure can be reproduced and any trend verified over time.
This is deliberate: a Davao cost figure is only worth citing if its sample, window, and method are visible. That standard is what separates the Index from unsourced crowd aggregators.
The open-data catalog
The Cost Index is one of several original datasets. All of them are indexed at /davao-data, each with its sample size, collection window, refresh cadence, a provenance file, and a downloadable file where the data supports one:
- Pag-IBIG MP2 vs Regular Savings dividends — the complete annual MP2 rate series (2017–2025), refreshed each February/March on the Pag-IBIG declaration. 2024–2025 rates are confirmed against PNA and GMA News; earlier regular-savings values are left blank rather than back-filled. Published as CSV.
- Davao Neighborhood Scorecard — five rental districts scored 0–5 across flood risk, walkability, safety, noise, and commute to five anchors, grounded in the per-district guides and refreshed quarterly.
- Region XI minimum wage — DOLE NWPC Wage Order RB XI-24 daily rates and 2026 tranche schedule, the basis for 13th-month and final-pay computation, refreshed on each wage-order revision.
Charts, trends, and the no-fabrication rule
Every visual on the site is decoration over a sourced table — never a substitute for one. The rules are absolute and enforced in code, not just stated here:
- The table is canonical. Each chart sits beside a server-rendered data table and a CSV; if scripting is off, or an AI is reading the page, the full figures are still present.
- No invented points. Missing values are left blank, never interpolated or back-filled to make a line look complete.
- A trend is worth its quarters. A time-series chart renders only once enough real periods exist. The Cost Index trend, for example, shows an explicit "baseline quarter" state and no line until a second real quarter is measured — a longitudinal claim is worth exactly the number of periods actually collected, and not one more.
What LiveDavao does not do
- Every article is researched and written against the standards documented at /editorial-standards, with pricing and rate figures verified against primary sources wherever they can be sourced.
- No affiliate-driven recommendations. We have no paid relationships with named buildings, landlords, banks, ISPs, or remittance services.
- No anonymous "best of" listicles. If a building or service is named, the article either explains why it's named or cites the data behind the mention.
See /sources for the canonical Tier-1 source list, /editorial-standards for the writing rules, and /about for background on the site.