The Ministry of Finance said yesterday that it had established a “buy back” mechanism to prevent land hoarding after the Control Yuan learned that some state-owned land sold in Taipei City and county had been kept undeveloped by property speculators.
The government’s top watchdog said yesterday that nearly 30 percent of public land auctioned off by the ministry’s National Property Administration between 2004 and last year had yet to be developed and up to 50 percent of it had changed hands.
Responding to the common practice of land arbitrage, Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德) told reporters that the ministry had set up a mechanism in May allowing it to “buy back” public land of 100 ping or above in the Taipei area that isn’t developed within two or three years of its initial auction.
But Lee said that the mechanism is not retroactive for land plots that were sold before May, adding that the government does not have “grounds” to ask land developers not to hoard the land and profit from price discrepancies as it has been sold through a public auction.
“This is a free market mechanism after all. We cannot intervene too much. Even if we do, the effect will be limited,” Lee said.
As of the end of last year, 75 of the 199 public land parcels that had been left undeveloped accounted for 33.67 percent of the combined 19.1-hectare of auctioned public land, Control Yuan member Lee Ping-nan (李炳南) said.
Thirteen of these land plots have been granted construction licenses, while 62 haven’t applied for approval yet. Nearly 55 percent of the 62 plots have changed hands, with some being resold three or four times, he said.
Some plots that were sold and remain undeveloped include a plot of 87.8 ping located on Roosevelt Rd. Sec. 3 sold for NT$626 million (US$19.6 million) and a plot of 116.16-ping on Renai Rd Sec. 2 which sold for NT$788 million, both of which were auctioned off on Jan 28, data provided by HB Housing (住商不動產) showed.
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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