Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities totaled 19,732 units last month, an increase of 13 percent from the same month last year, as builders completed pre-sale projects in Taipei and New Taipei City, government data showed on Monday.
The pickup affirmed a slow, but gradual recovery in the property market, where price concessions remain a critical facilitator, market watchers said.
“Pricing flexibility helps boost transactions as prospective buyers by and large refuse to increase their offer,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) researcher Jay Hsieh (謝志傑) said.
The pickup is most evident in the capital, where housing deals rose 89.4 percent to 3,775, mainly due to the completion of two urban renewal projects in Wanhua District (萬華), Hsieh said.
New Taipei City ranked first in terms of transaction volume, with 4,827 deals, an 11.71 percent improvement from a year earlier, according to the city government’s Web site.
Construction on pre-sale projects in the city’s Tamsui (淡水) and Banciao (板橋) districts came to an end, allowing developers to deliver about 400 apartment units, Hsieh said.
Transactions in Taichung rose 5.15 percent to 3,432 units and grew 8.92 percent to 1,881 units in Tainan, the cities’ land authorities indicated.
However, transactions in Taoyuan declined 10.65 percent to 2,784 units, while the number of deals slipped 2.73 percent to 3,033 units in Kaohsiung, official statistics showed.
Major housing complexes in Taoyuan were completed last year, raising the comparison base, market watchers said.
Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) researcher Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said the sentiment in the local housing market is at the highest level in recent years, but prospective buyers continue to show patience and would rather stay on the sidelines than rush into deals.
Sellers who fail to set prices in line with real-transaction prices would have difficulty finding buyers, Tseng said.
For the first quarter of the year, housing transactions increased 10.08 percent to 50,373 units in the six special municipalities.
The growth momentum is likely to extend through until the end of this quarter, but could slow down slightly in the second half of the year in the run-up to November’s nine-in-one elections, Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) said.
Candidates’ unfavorable rhetoric on the campaign trail to court young voters, most of whom have cited housing unaffordability as their No. 1 concern, could influence the property market, the broker said.
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