Unclaimed real-estate properties last year hit a record high and could climb higher as Taiwan’s population ages, driving up the number of inheritance disputes and unresolved cases, Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) said yesterday.
Unclaimed land plots reached 15,300 hectares at the end of last year, while unclaimed buildings amounted to 560,000 ping (1.85 million square meters), Sinyi said, citing data from the Ministry of the Interior.
Together, unclaimed land plots amount to an area larger than that of Kinmen County, while unclaimed building spaces are equal to five Taipei 101 skyscrapers, the real-estate brokerage said.
Photo: Lai Hsiao-tung, Taipei Times
Unclaimed properties eventually become state-owned assets after a declared period of time and are auctioned on the open market, Sinyi said.
Unclaimed land plots in Taipei alone totaled NT$78 billion (US$2.82 billion) last year based on government-declared values, which are much lower than market rates.
That suggests a significantly large sum for overall unclaimed land plots and buildings nationwide, Sinyi said.
Taiwan Financial Asset Service Corp (台灣金融資產服) last week auctioned an apartment in a 43-year-old building in Taipei’s Songshan District (松山) for NT$63.98 million on behalf of the government, 17.95 percent higher than the floor price of NT$54.25 million, the brokerage said.
The auction result translated into NT$1.19 million per ping, a record price for old apartments in the vicinity despite the virus outbreak, Sinyi said, pointing out that another apartment in the same building sold for NT$1.02 million per ping in 2019.
Housing prices continue to rise, aided by Taiwan’s stable economic growth, low interest rates and sufficient liquidity, despite the government’s measures to reverse the trend, Sinyi said.
The volume of inherited properties last year also rose to a new high of 59,000 units, but eased slightly this year to 34,000 in the first seven months, Sinyi found, attributing the slowdown to a local COVID-19 outbreak and social distancing restrictions.
Unclaimed and inherited real estate could gain momentum as Taiwan’s population ages, increasing inheritance disputes and unresolved cases, Sinyi researcher Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said.
Unclaimed properties tend to have multiple inheritors who cannot resolve their differences over ownership issues, Tseng said.
It is also common for inheritors to ignore properties with little monetary value and located in remote areas, he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts