The new home market last quarter remained mired in sluggish trade, but developers held prices firm, supported by low borrowing costs and the central government encouraging urban renewal, a report by Cathay Real Estate Development Co (國泰建設) and National Chengchi University’s Taiwan Real Estate Research Center (台灣房地產中心) said last week.
Continued economic recovery at home and abroad lent support to the sentiment on the part of suppliers, even though buyers continue to prefer to wait and see while uncertainty pans out.
Developers and builders put NT$182.9 billion (US$5.83 billion at the current exchange rate) of presale projects and new homes on the market during the October-to-December period, an increase of 2.5 percent from the same period in 2015, the report said.
“I do not see room for a price correction going forward with construction costs on the rise and set to climb higher if the US dollar gains value against the New Taiwan dollar, which would make imported building materials more expensive,” Highwealth Construction Corp (興富發) founder Cheng Chin-tien (鄭欽天) said last month.
Cheng said he saw inflationary pressure gathering pace following property tax hikes and new labor rules that require more overtime pay and annual leave for workers.
Assorted taxes accounted for 60 percent of the NT$3 billion in pretax profit the company earned from an apartment project last year, Cheng said.
On average, new homes in Taiwan cost NT$11.4 million per unit in the period, or NT$272,700 per ping (3.3m2), a 2.34 percent increase from three months earlier, the report said.
Small apartments with two to three bedrooms continued to dominate the market, as they remain relatively affordable to first-time buyers and people with investment needs, it said.
It is easy to find tenants for such apartments, which could generate rental incomes of 5 percent for people keen to digest idle capital, Shining Construction Group (鄉林集團) chairman Lai Cheng-yi (賴正鎰) said last month.
Price concessions stood at 18.26 percent, a 5.15 percent increase from the previous quarter, reflecting a widening gap between sellers and buyers over house value, the report said.
The 30-day sales rate stood a 9.22 percent, down 17.6 percent from three months earlier, in line with dwindling buying interest, it added.
For the whole of last year, new construction volume declined 30 percent from a year earlier, while transactions slumped nearly 40 percent, the report said, adding that the decline was across the board.
The research team said it expects the market to stabilize this year, as the economy has come out of the woods, the central bank has held interest rates low and the central government is encouraging urban renewal.
Policymakers are formulating tax cuts, preferential floor space ratios and other incentives to remove barriers for renewal bids, they said.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
Sanofi SA’s drug Dupixent succeeded in a late-stage trial for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), raising the odds that the blockbuster would be the first biologic medicine cleared to treat the lung disorder. Dupixent, which is already prescribed for asthma and some skin conditions, showed a 30 percent reduction in the rate at which patients’ COPD worsened compared with those who received a placebo during the stage-three Boreas trial, the company said in a statement yesterday. The positive data could herald a new era of cutting-edge treatments for the life-threatening respiratory affliction and provide another major boost in demand for the French
SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT: The international trade group said the sector would recover from a slump, with spending expected to rise 4.2 percent to US$24.9 billion Taiwan is to retain its position as the top spender on semiconductor front-end equipment and facilities next year, with spending expected to increase 4.2 percent year-on-year to US$24.9 billion, international trade group SEMI said yesterday. The spending forecast matches an expected recovery in global semiconductor equipment and facilities investment next year, it said. International equipment spending is to return to growth next year, SEMI said in a report, forecasting 21 percent growth to US$92 billion. The expansion would manly be driven by robust demand for semiconductors in the automotive and high-performance computing segments, the association said. “This quarter’s SEMI World Fab Forecast update
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry faces multiple challenges, from the need to conduct further research into forward-looking technologies to a shortage of talent, an industry executive said on Wednesday. Advancing forward-looking semiconductor research and nurturing talent require long-term joint efforts by the industry, government and academia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) corporate research director Marvin Chang (張孟凡) said. Chang outlined the challenges in a speech at a semiconductor forum organized by the National Science and Technology Council (NTSC) in Hsinchu. Noting that manufacturers have been deploying fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) technology for more than a decade to develop advanced microprocessors, Chang said nanosheet is