Taipei’s population has increased by 3.03 percent over the past four years, while home prices have risen 45.66 percent over the same period, indicating that steep rises in the cost of houses are failing to discourage people from moving to the capital, a magazine report said recently.
The city’s population rose 3.03 percent from 2,607,428 in 2009 to 2,686,516 last year, while home prices surged from NT$576,000 per ping (3.3m2) to NT$839,000 per ping (US$19,000 to US$27,700) over the same period, the Chinese-language Housing Monthly (住展雜誌) said.
“The figures show that an increasing number of people are choosing to take up residence in Taipei due to the good schools and convenience of living that the city offers,” Housing Monthly spokesman Ni Tzu-jen (倪子仁) said in the report.
The magazine’s findings contravened other reports saying that the city’s increasingly unaffordable homes have scared off prospective buyers, Ni said, adding that the rising prices have instead led people to make a big effort to earn and save enough money to buy a home in Taipei.
It takes Taipei residents an average of 14.7 years to own a home under a mortgage accounting for 44.8 percent of their income, Ministry of the Interior statistics show.
The home-price-to-income ratio stands at 9.2 percent elsewhere in Taiwan, with mortgage burdens making up 33.3 percent of the population’s income, according to the ministry’s data.
Ni said that the trend of relocating to Taipei makes sense, since housing prices in the city have proved resilient in times of economic distress, as seen during the SARS epidemic in 2004 and when the global financial crisis hit in 2008.
From 2009 to last year, the number of households in Taipei increased by 5.91 percent from 969,418 to 1.03 million, the magazine said.
The increase in the amount of households will lend support to home prices in the city this year, when some property funds are predicted to flow into equity markets in pursuit of quicker, higher returns, creating correction pressures on properties, Housing Monthly said.
Daan District (大安), where house prices average NT$1.34 million per ping, is the most expensive of the city’s administrative zones thanks to the clustering of wealthy residents there, the magazine’s report said.
Xinyi District (信義) ranks a close second, with home prices standing at NT$1.32 million per ping, and may soon overtake Daan as developers and builder are scheduled to launch more upscale housing units there, Housing Monthly said.
Over the past decade, Taipei’s population rose by 2.4 percent, while home prices increased by a multiple of 1.15, it added.
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