The Kaohsiung City Government yesterday said it would impose a property hoarding tax as it is seeking to contain speculation in the real-estate market, calling recent price increases “abnormal.”
The announcement came in support of the Ministry of Finance’s call for local governments to levy a high tax rate on people with more than one property.
Ministry officials on Tuesday discussed strategies to rein in speculation with the nation’s six special municipalities, as well as the Hsinchu city and county governments.
Photo: CNA
About 84,000 out of 1.06 million housing units in Kaohsiung are not residential property, the city government said in a statement yesterday.
The city would implement the hoarding tax based on three principles: fulfilling housing justice, keeping individual houses intact and ensuring that owners do not pass on the costs to renters, it said.
The city government has not yet decided on the tax rate, which would be subject to approval by city councilors, it said.
The ministry levies a tax of 1.5 to 3.6 percent on non-residential housing units and allows local governments to add their own taxes, capped at 30 percent.
The Taipei City Government levies a 2.4 percent hoarding tax for units held by owners with fewer than two units and 3.6 percent for those who own more than three units.
The Kaohsiung City Government said it is also stepping up efforts to build 10,500 social housing units and offering subsidies for renters to safeguard people’s fundamental right of housing.
City authorities would continue cracking down on illegal housing transactions involving nonbinding contracts.
Meanwhile, the Tainan City Government is planning to impose a hoarding tax next year.
At the meeting at the ministry, representatives from New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, and Hsinchu city and county also agreed to impose hoarding taxes.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
RSS