Saturday’s elections and the Jan. 1 implementation of a joint tax on housing and land sales have slowed or suspended most potential buyers’ plans to purchase homes, a poll released by property Web site Apple House showed.
A total of 55 percent of potential home buyers surveyed said they planned to delay buying homes in the first half of this year, according to the poll that was conducted between Nov. 6 and Dec. 11 last year.
Only 17 percent of respondents believe that the first half of the year is a good time to buy homes. Fifty-one percent said the second half is a good time, while 32 percent believe that this year is not an ideal year at all.
Apple House president Greg Yeh (葉國華) said the housing market was likely to warm up again in the second half of the year because housing policies would become clearer after Saturday’s elections, and because the joint tax on building and land sales would have been in place for a while, easing market concerns.
The poll also found that home buyers and sellers are widely divided over prices for this year.
Seventy-six percent of home buyers believe that prices are set to drop further in the first quarter of the year or over the entire year.
Only 28 percent of sellers foresee a first-quarter drop, 32 percent expect prices to go down over the year and 23 percent believe that prices would increase, the poll found.
However, Yeh said that it is unlikely that prices would rise, because of the nation’s slow economy, heavy selling by speculators and attempts by builders to sell off their remaining units after the removal of a luxury tax.
The poll collected 624 effective samples and had a margin of error of 3.86 percentage points.
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