Housing transactions totaled 19,695 units in the six special municipalities last month, an increase of 6.5 percent from a year earlier, as the local property market continued to improve, real-estate brokerages said, citing data collected from local governments.
Transfers in the six municipalities have a chance of hitting 300,000 units for the whole of this year if the market picks up by 10 percent this month, Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said yesterday.
The market is likely to see a fifth consecutive year of growth, Tseng said in a report.
Property analysts have been divided about whether the local market has seen a concrete recovery this year.
Cushman & Wakefield Taiwan general manager Billy Yen (顏炳立), for instance, has said that the market is in the process of consolidating, unless annual transactions return to the 300,000 mark.
Tseng said the latest data confirmed his observation that the market had already bottomed out in light of the uptrend in home deals, prices and land purchases.
Taoyuan reported the biggest year-on-year increase of 28.9 percent to 3,925 deals last month, followed by Taipei’s 10.7 percent increase to 2,396 deals.
The number of transactions in Kaohsiung climbed 7.9 percent to 3,110 units. In Tainan they increased 6.3 percent to 1,829 and in New Taipei City they grew 1.8 percent to 5,052, while in Taichung they dropped 9 percent to 3,383.
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last