A gauge for buying sentiment in the presale housing market in northern Taiwan last month flashed a “yellow-blue” light, signifying a sluggish market, for the 15th consecutive month, as a surge in locally transmitted COVID-19 inflections chilled transactions, the Chinese-language My Housing Monthly said in a report yesterday.
The gauge shed 3.2 points to 34 last month, the lowest in a year, as the market fared well in the first half of the month, but came to a sudden freeze in the second half after the government announced a nationwide level 3 COVID-19 alert on May 19, it said.
“The health crisis appears to have been far more effective than selective credit controls in cooling the property market, which has entered a dormant state,” My Housing research manager Ho Shih-chang (何世昌) said in the report.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
The situation is unlikely to improve this month, and construction of housing projects has slowed due to worsening labor and material shortages, the report said.
Presale projects last month totaled more than NT$60 billion (US$2.17 billion), most of which were launched before May 15, it said.
The number of prospective buyers plunged 35 percent from one month earlier to 27.5 per week, with 2.3 of them inking purchase contracts, down from 3.2 in April, it said.
Buying interest evaporated from the third week of last month, with more than 50 percent of presale housing reception sites reporting no visitors at all, Ho said.
The chill was most conspicuous in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華) and New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和) due to their relatively high number of infections, and most developers in these districts have suspended sales, the report said.
Despite the sharp drop in interest, developers are not willing to yield on prices, with the room for negotiations dropping from 7.5 percent to 6.83 percent, it said.
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