Presale and new home projects totaled NT$194.5 billion (US$5.95 billion) last quarter, down 47.3 percent from a year earlier, as builders turned conservative about developing new houses nationwide, a survey by Cathay Real Estate Development Co (國泰建設) showed yesterday.
The slump spread to central and southern Taiwan where property funds have migrated in recent years to take advantage of relative affordability and strengthened public infrastructure, said Takming University of Science and Technology professor Hua Ching-chun (花敬群), who presented the quarterly report at a press conference in Taipei.
The figure represented a 28.6 percent decline when compared with three months earlier, according to the survey carried out by National Chengchi University’s Taiwan Real Estate Research Center.
“Selling pressure is building across the nation for all kinds of products,” Hua said, adding that the cautious sentiment could deepen going forward due to political uncertainty ahead of the presidential and legislative elections in January, rather than property tax increases.
The expected handover of power in the elections diminishes expectations that the market would benefit from increasing cross-strait economic exchanges, Hua said.
Major market players are taking a wait-and-see attitude until the dust settles, Hua said.
In the absence of price concessions, inventory levels could remain high, he added.
Earlier this month, Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) said housing prices were not likely to drop by between 10 and 20 percent this year, as prospective buyers are hoping, because construction companies and real-estate agents are not willing to lower prices.
Cathay Real Estate spokesman Lin Chin-liang (林清樑) said his company has no intention of lowering prices due to high land and building costs.
It is unrealistic to expect drastic price adjustments on the part of developers, Lin said, adding that Cathay Real Estate is braced for an extended soft market.
Rather, the company is shifting its attention away from developing luxury homes and focusing on projects that offer comfort and convenience, he said.
Cathy Real Estate has made frequent trips to Japan in the past six months to learn how its peers are developing safe, comfortable smart homes, he added.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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