Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald yesterday offered to trade his two-story farmhouse — for which he traded a famous red paper clip one year ago — in Taipei by putting an ad on a local eBay-affiliated classified ad site operated by Kijiji Taiwan (奇集集).
The 28-year-old told the company’s media briefing yesterday he wants to trade the house, whose value he said he was uncertain of, for an “unprecedented” and “new” experience — “Or maybe Taipei 101,” he jested.
In a room packed with Kijiji members, MacDonald described how his previous 14 trades had gone, culminating in the fulfillment of his dream to own a house. He said a “pure” exchange was very challenging, as certain things only have value to certain people.
”You can’t put a price on an experience or an opportunity,” he said.
MacDonald became a household name after bartering his way from a single red paper clip in March 2005 to trading a movie role for a farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan, in a series of trades spanning a little more than a year.
Kijiji Taiwan’s country manager, Celine Chiang (蔣馨誼), said yesterday that MacDonald was an inspiration to members of her Web site, where new postings for trades have grown 72 percent year-on-year in the first half of this year.
She said most members were hoping to trades objects they no longer needed for daily necessities such as shampoo or tissues as a way to fight inflation. Female members often traded used handbags or clothes, while men mostly gave away used electronic gadgets.
Miss Chung, a Kijiji member, agreed, saying that trading was a good way to give away items she no longer needed to someone who may need them.
She said she had once traded an object worth only NT$300 for one five times its value.
The Web site operator used MacDonald’s speech in Taipei as a charity benefit to collect 100 school bags from people attending.
The school bags will be donated to financially disadvantaged school children in southern Taiwan, Chiang said.
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last