Following the planned inking of a trade pact with China, the nation’s residential property market is poised to embrace international buyers, which has provided a boost to property prices including for luxury homes, realtors said yesterday.
The inflow of capital from China has greatly accelerated to total US$34.82 million in the first four months of this year, compared with US$37.49 million for the whole of last year, Jeffrey Huang (黃增福), an assistant manager at Evertrust Rehouse Co’s (永慶房屋) research and development department, told a media briefing yesterday, citing statistics from the Investment Commission.
Huang also said properties in Taiwan have become more attractive than their counterparts in Hong Kong and Singapore, given their price valuation.
In Taipei City, a total of 5,979 properties changed hands last month, representing a 20 percent growth year-on-year and was the second-highest monthly volume this year after 6,395 transactions in January, said Huang, citing the city government’s latest statistics.
Among the city’s 12 districts, the number of property transactions in Wanhua District (萬華) saw the biggest jump — 55 percent — month-on-month last month, followed by a 32.7 percent increase in Nangang District (南港) and 22 percent in Xinyi District (信義), the government’s data showed.
Despite market concerns about a property price correction in the second half of the year, Credit Suisse analyst Sidney Yeh (葉昌明) said in a client note yesterday that prices in Taipei’s pre-sale market will hold up well, thanks to tight supply in the primary market.
“We anticipate estate prices to be flattish in the second half of the year, following an 8 percent to 10 percent increase in the first half,” Yeh said, citing a 20 percent drop in new supply in the first half from the 2005 to 2008 average.
Meanwhile, Chinese-language Housing Monthly’s estimates showed that the city’s 12 luxury housing projects have averaged a rise of between 21 percent and 150 percent compared with closing prices between 1998 and last year.
For example, the unit price at the luxury project on Minshui Road by JUT Land Development Group (忠泰建設) has jumped by 150 percent from NT$600,000 (US$18,554) per ping in 2000 to NT$1.5 million now, followed by a 146 percent hike in the unit price of another project on Xinyi Road by Fubon Land Development Co (富邦建設), which currently averages NT$1.8 million per ping, it said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY KEVIN CHEN
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Australian singer Kylie Minogue says “nothing compares” to performing live, but becoming an international wine magnate in under six years has been quite a thrill for the Spinning Around star. Minogue launched her first own-label wine in 2020 in partnership with celebrity drinks expert Paul Schaafsma, starting with a basic rose but quickly expanding to include sparkling, no-alcohol and premium rose offerings. The actress and singer has since wracked up sales of around 25 million bottles, with her carefully branded products pitched at low-to mid-range prices in dozens of countries. Britain, Australia and the United States are the biggest markets. “Nothing compares to performing
RSS