Owning a house has become increasingly unaffordable in Taipei City in light of soaring prices and falling disposable income for average households, a recent survey by a local real estate service provider found.
From January to this month, a 30 ping (99.18m²) apartment cost about NT$14.31 million (US$44,700), or NT$477,000 per ping, according to Sinyi Realty Co (信義房屋), the nation’s only listed real estate brokerage.
That is about 11.5 times more than the average disposable income of NT$1.25 million for individual households in the city, compared with 9.9 times a year earlier, the report said.
“In the absence of financial help, it is impractical for the average family to buy a house as it would take more than a decade to pay off the mortgage,” Stanley Su (蘇啟榮), a senior researcher at Sinyi said.
Rising housing prices led the central bank to hike interest rates by 12.5 basis points in June as well as introduce selective credit controls in Taipei City and 10 popular areas of Taipei County to help curb rising housing prices.
A rate hike of 12.5 basis points adds an extra NT$47 per month to every NT$1 million of mortgaged money, according to Sinyi’s estimate.
While the central bank’s tightening measures have yet to trigger a notable price correction, housing turnover has dropped 10 percent, signaling residential prices in the Greater Taipei area are unlikely to climb higher in the foreseeable future, Su said.
Nationwide, annual disposable incomes for average households fell 2.9 percent year-on-year to NT$888,000 last year, the lowest level since 2003, data released on Aug. 19 by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed.
An average household consists of 3.34 members with 1.46 of them making regular financial contributions each month, according to the agency.
The figures showed it is even more difficult for residents from other parts of Taiwan to own a house in Taipei City.
Su said he expected more and more people to settle in Taipei County, where an apartment of 30 ping costs an average of NT$6.93 million, based on price data for the first eight months.
The amount, 7.8 times as much as disposable income, is more affordable for average families, the report said, adding that the burden drops further to 3.3 times in Kaohsiung City.
Sinyi advises home owners and potential buyers to brace for higher mortgage burdens as the central bank is likely to raise interest rates by another 12.5 basis points in its quarterly board meeting next month to cool the property sector.
The central bank’s benchmark discount rate remains low at its current 1.375 percent, while the nation’s strong second-quarter GDP growth of 12.53 percent would give the central bank room for further tightening, the brokerage said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
RSS