New home construction totaled NT$114.4 billion (US$3.51 billion) in the first quarter, shrinking 44.4 percent from the same period last year, a report showed yesterday.
However, buying interest picked up modestly in March after the central bank cut interest rates and eased mortgage restrictions, Cathay Real Estate Development Co (國泰建設) and National Chengchi University’s Taiwan Real Estate Research Center (台灣房地產中心) said in the report.
Pundits said price corrections of up to 20 percent are necessary to facilitate transactions and the government must halt unfavorable policies to avoid a hard landing.
“The incoming administration should postpone talks of inheritance tax hikes until the economy recovers to avoid further hurting the property market,” Tamkang University professor of industrial economics Chuang Meng-han (莊孟翰) said by telephone yesterday.
Land developers and property builders have been struggling to digest inventories with little success, because buyers remain on the sidelines for fear of price declines, said Chuang, whom the government usually consults on the housing market. Some presale project buyers would rather forfeit their deposit than go through with their purchase agreements, because they may incur greater losses when the construction is completed, Chuang said.
It is common for builders and developers to offer free interior decoration, home appliances and other gifts in the hope of boosting sales, he observed.
Thirty-day sales rates slid to 8.13 percent during the January-to-March period, the quarterly report indicated, suggesting the market has yet to hit bottom. Price concessions hit 17.42 percent, widening by 1.03 percent from the preceding quarter, it showed.
Government efforts to make the nation’s wealth more equitably distributed make sense, but they should wait for a couple of years when the economy turns around, Chuang said, adding that higher taxes would inevitably raise holding costs, further slowing transactions.
Chang Chin-oh (張金鶚), a land economics professor and longstanding critic of soaring housing prices in the nation, said unreasonably high prices accounted for the sluggish market and corrections are necessary to solve the problem of housing unaffordability.
“Houses should not be turned into investment products as seen in the past decade, because the practice deprives the ordinary public of a fair chance of owning a shelter and threatens social stability,” Chang said.
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],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
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