Our paper explores the informative power of artificial brightness, derived from meteorological satellites, in determining land values at the city-level from 1997 to 2012 in the Philippines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to do so, thereby, contributing to the literature and to the real estate development in the country. We construct innovative longitudinal data, which captures both the temporal and spatial effects of night-time lights (NTL) intensity on zonal values. Our fixed effects panel estimates support the findings in the existing literature with caveats. The relationship between NTL and land values is nuanced and heterogenous conditional on the level of brightness and the type of land. NTL has a quadratic concave-downward effect on residential land values while a linear positive effect on commercial zonal values. The results could be attributed to the diminishing returns to urbanization, which NTL intensity is proxying for, light pollution, and signal saturation. Our results highlight the relevance of incorporating remotely sensed earth observations into the country’s cadastral and land tax systems. This process has the potential to contribute to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) such as building resilient communities and infrastructures, and reducing inequality (SDGs 9, 10 and 11).