Real-estate prices in Taipei might post a slight decline in the second half of this year because of a proposed luxury tax, but could rebound next year because of consistent demand and relatively low interest rates, realtors said yesterday.
“Property prices in Taipei will only fall by about 5 percent because of the luxury tax,” Chiu Tai-hsuan , head of the research center at Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋), told a media briefing.
Although the proposed luxury tax has already caused turnover in the property market in Taipei to cool down, demand for self-use residences remains strong, Chiu said.
Demand for households in Taipei City was 981,000 units in the third quarter last year, but there were only a total of 900,000 units, showing demand for an additional 81,000 units, data from the Ministry of the Interior showed.
That means turnover in the housing market in Taipei mainly cooled off because of a drop in the number of short-term speculators, but strong demand for self-use units will lead to a rebound in real-estate prices in the longer run, Chiu said.
“As speculators begin to hold on to their properties even longer, the [persistent] demand might drive housing prices even higher,” he said.
The relatively low interest rate for mortgages in Taiwan could be another factor driving growth in the real-estate market in Taipei, keeping turnover steady, Chiu said.
Interest rates on bank loans for real estate stand at 2.5 percent to 2.8 percent at local banks, data showed.
“Speculators only begin to feel uncertainty when the interest rate reaches 3.5 percent,” Chiu said.
However, the luxury tax will have a greater impact on real-estate prices in certain regions of New Taipei City and Greater Taichung, because speculators targeting those areas might withdraw their investment, Chiu said.
“Real-estate prices could fall between 15 and 20 percent in specific areas, such as Linkou, Sansia and Sinjhuang in New Taipei City, as well as the new phase-7 zoning area in Greater Taichung. Most of the cases in these regions were controlled by speculators,” Chiu said.
Billy Yen (顏炳立), general manager at the international real-estate consultancy DTZ Debenham Tie Leung (戴德梁行), also said the luxury tax would likely drag down real-estate prices that have gone up too much in certain zoning areas in New Taipei City, places that are relatively inconvenient to live.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts