The nation’s property market looks like it will be bullish over the course of the next six months, with price hikes expected and more buyers willing to purchase houses, a real estate firm said yesterday.
Unless unforeseen circumstances arise — such as a more severe outbreak of influenza A(H1N1) or a soaring unemployment rate — housing prices will experience an upward trend as the economy recovers, Richard Liu (劉天仁), vice president of Chinatrust Real Estate Co (中信房屋), told a media briefing.
“The global economy is slowly recovering and Taiwan’s property buyers and sellers are upbeat about short-term prospects,” he said.
The fourth quarter is traditionally a peak season for the property market. More buyers purchase units if sellers are willing to slash prices, which affects the ultimate trading volume, he said.
The nation’s property market plunged to a record low in the fourth quarter last year and early this year, hit hard by the financial crisis. However, property prices in the period from March to this month have rebounded to the pre-financial crisis level, the company said.
A survey commissioned by Chinatrust Real Estate, which polled 1,249 effective samples this month, found that in the third quarter, consumers showed the highest level of dissatisfaction on property prices so far this year. As many as 70 percent of buyers refused to pay extra for properties sold beyond their expectation, and 37.5 percent wanted a much lower price.
More than half of the respondents were still house hunting despite the A(H1N1) threat in the third quarter. Around 70 percent of buyers believed the prices would drop further if the swine flu threat deepens, up from 47 percent in the second quarter.
The Architecture and Building Research Institute, an agency of the Ministry of the Interior, released a report on Thursday that said housing prices were going to rise in the near term.
However, Chang Chin-oh (張金鶚), a land economics professor at National Chengchi University, feels differently.
He said the market prices now were far beyond the level that consumers could afford, and property prices would contract slowly next year, unless factors such as the unemployment rate and salary contraction showed signs of improvement.
Separately, Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) said in a statement yesterday that a 26.6 ping (87.9m²) storefront in Yonghe, Taipei County, which belongs to World Soybean Milk Magnate (世界豆漿大王), was auctioned off at a new high with a closing price of NT$60 million (US$1.85 million).
That translates to NT$2.25 million per ping, which is 60 percent more than the market price in the neighborhood, the realtor said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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