Realtors welcomed the Cabinet's proposal to transform some farmland into countryside residential communities, saying the project would benefit farm owners, construction firms and home buyers.
"The project will benefit all three parties that are involved," Benson Liao (廖本勝), president of the Evertrust Rehouse Group (永慶房仲集團), said by telephone yesterday.
Owners of selected farmland would be able to sell their land at market prices, construction firms would have more land on which to construct housing units, while buyers would be able to purchase country homes at lower prices, Liao said.
According to the Cabinet's draft of the act for rebuilding farm villages (農村改建條例), the government plans to transform 10,000 hectares of farmland nationwide into residential communities, each measuring at least 25 hectares, about the size of Da-An Forest Park in Taipei.
Land that is close to cities or with convenient public transport connections would be identified and acquired by local governments and later auctioned off to construction firms.
After deducting the cost of acquiring the land from the selling price, 40 percent of the profit would be paid to the previous owners, 30 percent would go to a fund for rebuilding rural villages, with the remaining 30 percent going to the local government.
Liao said that construction firms, that have been scrambling to acquire a decreasing supply of land in cities, could buy land in the countryside to build vacation homes or communities for the elderly as the nation's population demographic continues to age.
The low building coverage ratio -- the ratio between the area occupied by a building and the overall area of the site -- would guarantee a good quality of life for buyers, he said.
The building coverage ratio for the new developments is 30 percent, meaning, for example, that firms would only be able to build a 30-ping house on a 100-ping plot, while the rest of the space would be used for lawns and community areas.
The ratio for residential areas in cities is 60 percent, for industrial zones 70 percent and for designated commercial areas it is 80 percent.
Another real estate expert appeared more cautious about the draft bill. Su Chi-jung (蘇啟榮), a director at Sinyi Real Estate Inc (信義房屋), the nation's largest housing agency, said for the commercial property market, location would still be the key.
Land close to Taipei City, for example, would attract more bids from construction firms. Plots along the route of the high-speed railway would also be preferential buying targets, Su said.
Construction stocks did not seem to gain much of a boost from the proposed policy yesterday, as the construction sub-index rose by only 2.14 percent.
"The overall outlook for the property market has showed signs of stagnation or even decline, which mitigated the boost the farmland could have given the market," said Alex Huang (黃國偉), vice assistant president at Mega Securities Corp (兆豐證券).
The mainstream product remains luxury apartments priced at NT$1 million (US$30,267) per ping or above, while the demand for vacation homes in the countryside or retirement properties is not strong, Huang 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
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
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