Commercial property sales remained weak last quarter, but land deals gained traction as builders and developers built up stocks of land, encouraged by a pickup in housing transactions, analysts said.
Land deals totaled NT$40.3 billion (US$1.38 billion) from January to last month, a 39 percent improvement from a year earlier, while commercial property transactions declined 34 percent to NT$8.8 billion over the period, global real-estate consultancy REPro Knight Frank (瑞普萊坊) said.
The figure for land deals with superficies rights marked the highest since 2010 as local builders and developers sought to make their presence felt in rezoning districts nationwide, said REPro Knight Frank researcher Andy Huang (黃舒衛), who is based in Taipei.
Residential and commercial land deals surged almost 80 percent to NT$32.2 billion last quarter, while industrial lot deals, the main driver over the past few quarters, took a 3 percent downturn to NT$7.3 billion, the consultancy’s quarterly report showed.
The trend suggests a recovery in developers’ confidence, Huang said, adding that local county and city governments lent their support by putting land plots in rezoning areas on the market.
Land-hunting interest was most evident in Kaohsiung, which saw NT12.6 billion of land deals, followed by New Taipei City with NT$9.5 billion and Taipei with NT$6.7 billion, the report said.
Huang said he holds a neutral view with a positive bias regarding the housing market’s spring sales season, which started on March 29 and lasts until the end of this month.
The confidence recovery extends to the superficies rights market as evidenced by the acquisition of a contract to develop a plot in Kaohsiung for NT$7.81 billion by Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽), he said.
Government agencies have made concessions in royalty and rent charges to make superficies rights more attractive to potential buyers, he added.
The market for commercial properties remained mired in sluggish trade, underpinned by self-occupancy needs, the report said.
Pegatron Corp (和碩), Apple Inc’s second-largest iPhone assembler, bought an industrial complex in New Taipei City for NT$2.23 billion, it said, adding that flexible PCB producer Career Technology Co (嘉聯益), another Apple supplier, acquired an industrial compound in Taoyuan from silicon wafer maker Eversol Corp (旭晶) for NT$1.57 billion.
The market might see more excitement later this year because Core Pacific City Mall (京華城) is seeking a buyer. The mixed-use complex, which sits on a plot measuring 5,000 ping (16,529m2, is worth at least NT$40.6 billion, said Billy Yen (顏炳立), general manager of Cushman & Wakefield Taiwan, which is organizing an auction for the mall.
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
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
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
RSS