Drew Arellano Built a Wall Around His Kids’ Endorsement Money — and a Rental Villa on the Side

For nearly two decades, Filipino television host and actor Andrew James “Drew” Arellano built a public identity on movement — provincial highways, roadside carinderias, and coastal towns most of Philippine TV never bothered pointing a camera at, all as the host of Biyahe ni Drew, GMA Network’s long-running weekly travel program. He built a house the same way.

In December 2021, Arellano and his wife, television presenter Raelene Elaine “Iya” Villania-Arellano, broke ground on their first family home in Taytay, a town in Rizal province just east of Metro Manila. By the time it was finished in 2023, Villania had settled on one word for it: “tiny.” A two-story house designed around a play area, a trampoline, and a bathroom sized for kids rather than for show. “The little house that we’re building here in Taytay is almost finished. It’s just really a tiny home,” she said while giving fans a video tour. Two decades of combined hosting income between them, and this is what they built.

Drew Arellano and Iya Villania-Arellano with their children — Drew Arellano and Iya Villania-Arellano, whose five children have their own endorsement earnings — none of which the family touches for everyday expenses.

The Money the Kids Never See

The same instinct runs through how the Arellanos handle their children’s own income. Their five kids — Antonio Primo, Alonzo Leon, Alana Lauren, Astro Phoenix, and Anya Love — have booked brand endorsements of their own since Primo was small, most recently as part of a family Jollibee campaign Villania called “a great honor.” None of that money touches the household budget. In a 2024 interview, Arellano laid out the rule plainly: every peso the kids earn from an endorsement goes into stocks and blue-chip shares — equity in large, financially established companies, chosen for stability over speculation — while school fees, utilities, and the actual cost of raising five children come out of his and Villania’s own salaries. “Hundred percent!” he said of the policy. Villania put the reasoning even more bluntly: skip the investing step, and “masasayang lang lahat ng paghihirap mo” — all that hard work goes to waste.

Showbiz income doesn’t hold steady. Projects wrap, endorsement deals rotate, a network’s programming priorities shift without warning. A household that lets bonus income set its everyday spending has to shrink every time the work slows down. The Arellanos set this rule long before the house or their public financial-wellness advocacy made either strategy visible to anyone outside the family.

Drew Arellano, Iya Villania, and three of their children in an earlier family photo — The Arellano family in an earlier photo, before their two youngest were born. They now have five children total.

Making the Boring Stuff Public

That private discipline became a public pitch in 2025, when Villania, Arellano, and all five of their children signed on as the faces of a bank’s insurance arm’s “Rethink Healthy” campaign — an initiative built on the idea that wellness isn’t only physical. Per the campaign’s own materials, the family’s approach includes building an emergency fund, planning ahead for the kids’ education, and carrying insurance coverage, treated with the same seriousness as diet or sleep. “We want to provide the best future for our kids,” Villania said. “That means teaching them about money, building good habits, and protecting their dreams with the right tools.”

The family fronted a separate Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) campaign back in 2022, where they credited the bank’s housing loan program directly with getting the Taytay house built. The house wasn’t paid for outright. It was financed, the same way most Filipino families finance a home.

An earlier photo of Drew Arellano — Drew Arellano earlier in his career, before *Biyahe ni Drew* made him a household name.

Not Every Property Gets Called Tiny

The restraint doesn’t extend to everything the family has built. In September 2025, the Arellanos opened Bahay ni Drew, a four-bedroom, solar-powered vacation villa in Tanay, a separate Rizal town about an hour from their Taytay home, for public bookings. Guests get an infinity pool, a heated jacuzzi, a home gym, and a billiards room, at an introductory rate of ₱45,000 a night on weekdays and ₱55,000 on weekends. Drew named it after the show that made him a household name. Nobody’s calling this one tiny — it’s a working rental business with its own active income, a different kind of asset than a stock portfolio quietly compounding in the background.

Bahay ni Drew, Drew Arellano's rental villa in Tanay, Rizal — Bahay ni Drew, the Arellanos’ rental villa in Tanay, Rizal, open for bookings since September 2025.

Infinity pool at Bahay ni Drew in Tanay, Rizal — The infinity pool at Bahay ni Drew — part of a ₱45,000-to-55,000-a-night package.

What the Restraint Is Actually For

Philippine show business runs on a fairly standard script: income arrives, and the proof shows up fast, in the new car or the bigger house or whatever else signals the work is paying off. The Arellanos have mostly opted out of that script. What they’re actually protecting is their kids’ sense of what money is for.

A child born into public visibility gets access to money before they have any real framework for what it represents. Left alone, that access can quietly warp a kid’s sense of what effort and reward are supposed to look like. By walling off the endorsement earnings entirely — no allowance, no discretionary spending, just equity that sits and compounds — the Arellanos are drawing a hard line between an opportunity their children didn’t earn through labor and the discipline required to actually keep it.

Plenty of families with money lose it within a generation or two, usually not from bad luck but from never building the habits that would have protected it. Teaching a six-year-old that a brand deal isn’t pocket money, or choosing “tiny” over “impressive” when the budget clearly allowed for either, is a strange kind of parenting. Whether it works won’t be obvious for another fifteen or twenty years, once the kids are the ones deciding what to do with a paycheck nobody’s investing for them anymore.