Internet portal Yahoo-Kimo Inc (
"The Internet has become the primary channel for home shopping," Rose Tsou (
The demand for online house searches has increased significantly along with the red hot property market in recent years, making the channel even more important, Tsou said.
Yahoo-Kimo inaugurated a property portal that provided listings from seven realtors in 2005.
The number of partners on the new site has expanded to 11, with six real estate agents including Sinyi Real Estate Inc (
POLL
A poll conducted by Yahoo-Kimo showed that 65 percent of Internet users said they search for properties online when they started shopping for new homes.
A survey of the 11 firms showed that in the past, realtors needed to take their customers to visit 13.6 apartments on average before a transaction was concluded.
Visits for those who searched houses online decreased to 6.3 apartments, which greatly increases the efficiency for agents, Yahoo-Kimo said.
Taking house listings online also helps to accelerate the time it takes to clinch deals. It takes about 28 days for home buyers who search for houses online to purchase a property, while it takes 39 days for those who don't, the survey showed.
"Online real estate is without doubt a trend in the market," said Howard Chou (
"Customers no longer need to waste time by physically visiting vast numbers of houses like they used to," he said.
Despite most real estate agents having their own sites to provide pictures and video clips of houses and apartments, the huge amount of traffic generated by Yahoo-Kimo has proven to bring even more business to the company, Chou said.
VIDEO CLIPS
Currently, Sinyi Real Estate has video clips for more than half of the properties it sells, which allows users to get an all round view of the houses, Chou said.
Other new functions provided by Yahoo-Kimo's new site include buying aids such as feng shui, legal and moving advice, decorating guides with different styles and budgets and online loan accounting.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by