Commercial property transactions remained soft last quarter, but land deals gained traction as builders and developers started to build inventory in anticipation of a gradual and slow recovery, analysts said.
Builders and developers accounted for 60 percent of the NT$18.9 billion (US$617.63 million) of land deals in the first quarter, up 50 percent from the same period the previous year.
That shows the market is soon to emerge from protracted corrections, Colliers International Taiwan managing director Andrew Liu (劉學龍) said.
“The attitude of builders and developers serves as a market barometer and their willingness to increase their stock of land suggests a turnaround is around the corner,” Liu said last week.
Major deals included Ruentex Development Co (潤泰創新) purchasing land in Taipei’s Nangang District (南港) for NT$3.5 billion, Farglory Land Development Co’s (遠雄建設) NT$2.15 billion purchase in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) and in Taichung, and Highwealth Construction Corp’s (興富發) NT$1 billion purchase in Kaohsiung.
Both Cushman & Wakefield Co and Jones Lang LaSalle Inc have at a similar outlook.
Cushman & Wakefield real-estate appraisal director Charlie Yang (楊長達) said on Thursday that land purchases could recover to the 10-year average of NT$$110 billion this year, thanks to low interest rates and ample liquidity.
Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰人壽), the nation’s largest life insurer, last month bought a plot of land in downtown Taipei for NT$2.33 billion to help digest idle funds.
The nation’s top 10 insurance companies accumulated more than NT$4.5 trillion of investment funds last year, an increase of 15.4 percent from the previous year, while deposits outpaced loans by NT$10 trillion to NT$36 trillion, Jones Lang LaSalle said.
Life insurers have refrained from real-estate investments, bounded by the minimum yield requirement of 2.345 percent set by the regulator while return rates stand at 2.5 percent for commercial properties in popular locations of Taipei, Jones Lang LaSalle Taiwan managing director Tony Chao (趙正義) said on Thursday.
Net returns would drop to 2 percent after factoring in property and land taxes, Chao said.
Colliers International Taiwan said that holding costs are unreasonably high, as they eat into 25 percent of rental incomes and are four times higher than in Hong Kong.
High property and land taxes have made commercial properties an unintended victim of the government’s effort to curb price increases, Liu said, calling for selective tax cuts for commercial properties.
Commercial property transactions totaled NT$8.35 billion last quarter, down 6.7 percent from a year earlier, according to Jones Lang LaSalle tallies.
Cushman & Wakefield Taiwan general manager Billy Yen (顏炳立) said the property market, whether commercial or residential, might not recover unless sellers lower prices.
A few builders have come to the realization and set reasonable prices for pre-sale projects, Yen said, adding that the move would highlight that prices for existing properties are unreasonably high.
The rebound in housing transactions in the first quarter would slow the pace of price corrections rather than usher in a sustained recovery, Yen said.
The housing market is expected to remain weak until transactions recover to 300,000 units a year, Yen said.
The number is likely to be between 250,000 and 260,000 units this year based on the performance in the first quarter, compared with 245,000 units last year, he 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],”
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
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