Small apartments this year continued to be the mainstream product in the local property market, as relocation and investment needs stalled, leaving first-time home buyers to underpin transactions, a market watcher said on Friday.
Apartments with one or two bedrooms have so far this year accounted for more than 50 percent of presale projects in northern Taiwan, replacing three-bedroom apartments as the mainstream product for the second consecutive year, Housing Monthly said.
As of Dec. 10, there were 698 presale two-bedroom apartments, making up 41.6 percent of all presale projects, while one-bedroom apartments constituted another 15.9 percent, the Chinese-language magazine said.
“Housing prices have grown increasingly unbearable and prospective buyers have no choice but to lower space expectations,” Chinese-language Housing Monthly (住展雜誌) research manager Ho Shih-chang (何世昌) said by telephone.
Lingering expectations of price falls have driven people with relocation needs to stay on the sidelines, leaving first-time home buyers with moderate budgets to sustain the market, Ho said.
Large apartments with four bedrooms were the least popular, accounting for 12.9 percent of presale projects, down 3 percent year-on-year, Ho said, adding that the downturn can be found in both downtown and suburban areas.
Two-bedroom units were more popular among investors who prefer real-estate properties to other investment tools, the magazine said.
Such apartments might generate modest rental yields of 2 or 3 percent, but it is difficult to find tenants for large luxury apartments, Ho said.
There are more than 46,000 small apartments in the nation’s six major municipalities priced at about NT$10 million (US$333,422) each, statistics from online property information provider Ubee (屋比) showed.
The offers would allow buyers to keep mortgage burdens at 30 percent of household incomes, Ubee said.
Meanwhile, property transfers have stabilized, with inheritance and gift-giving accounting for 24 percent of the volume as the nation’s population ages, Ministry of the Interior statistics show.
Property transfers have so far this year made up 65 percent of overall transactions, compared with 64.8 percent last year and 79 percent in 2007, the data showed.
Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋), the nation’s only listed real-estate broker, attributed the movements to improved confidence and structural demographic changes.
“More people pass on real estate as gifts and inheritance to meet asset allocation needs,” Sinyi research manager Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said in a report on Thursday.
The demand might pick up further speed as the population grows older, Tseng added.
Property transactions for inheritance and gift-giving reasons constituted 6 percent of total transfers in 2007, while the ratio more than doubled to 12.7 percent in 2015 and 13 percent last year, he said.
This means about one in four transactions resulted from inheritances and gift-giving, as aging Taiwanese shift wealth to the younger generations, he said.
The new tax code might weaken property-giving needs due to less tax-saving efficiency, Tseng added.
The past decade also saw fewer foreclosed properties, down to 1.2 percent of overall transfers this year, compared with 4.9 percent in 2007, government data show.
Nonetheless, ample liquidity and low borrowing costs allow property owners to weather the down cycle, Sinyi said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS