Housing affordability grew worse in the first quarter, as the average mortgage burden climbed by 0.52 percentage points to 38.35 percent nationwide, a report released yesterday by the Ministry of the Interior showed.
The data suggest that mortgages accounted for a big chunk of the disposable income of households on average and this would worsen after the central bank raised interest rates twice and increased the mortgage burden by 1.5 percent.
The ministry classifies mortgage burdens as follows: below 30 percent, reasonable; higher than 30 percent, slightly high; more than 40 percent, relatively high; and more than 50 percent, overly high.
Photo: Lam Yik Fei, Bloomberg
Mortgage burdens in Taipei constituted 64.91 percent of household incomes, retreating from 65.09 percent three months earlier as housing prices became less expensive at 16.22 times the average household income, the ministry said.
Mortgage burden in New Taipei City ranked second at 51.45 percent, gaining 1.43 percentage points from the preceding quarter, the ministry said.
During the first three months of the year, mortgage burden rose by 1.58 percentage points to 45.08 percent of household income in Taichung, where housing prices were 11.26 times the average household income, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, Yilan, Hsinchu and Changhua counties, as well as Tainan and Kaohsiung, all saw mortgage burdens surpass 35 percent, but the figure in Taoyuan declined a fractional 0.26 percentage points to 31.5 percent.
Keelung, Chiayi County and Yunlin County are among the few in Taiwan where the mortgage burden remained below the reasonable threshold of 30 percent, the ministry found.
The report also showed that the home price index, which gauges fluctuations in residential property values in the nation, rose 2.99 percent from a quarter earlier to 121.01 in the first quarter.
The ministry attributed the increase to robust economic growth, low interest rates and inflationary expectations.
In the January-to-March period, Kaohsiung and Taichung saw the largest increase in the home price sub-index among the six special municipalities, rising 4.7 percent and 3.65 percent respectively from the preceding quarter, data showed.
The sub-indices for Taoyuan and Taipei saw the lowest increases of 2.7 percent and 1.91 percent respectively, the data showed.
Analysts said housing price changes would not affect the mortgage burden of existing homeowners even though price corrections might mitigate the burden of new borrowers.
Despite headwinds ahead for the market, housing prices would hold firm, because sellers believe property is a good defense against inflation and economic upheavals, they said.
Additional reporting by CNA
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, has decided to slow down its 3-nanometer chip production as Intel Corp, one of its major customers, plans to push back the launch of its new Meteor Lake tGPU chipsets to the end of next year, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. That means Intel has canceled almost all of the 3-nanometer capacity booked for next year, with only a small amount of wafer input remaining for engineering verification, the Taipei-based researcher said in a report. Based on Intel’s original schedule, TSMC was to start producing the new chipsets in
DATA SHOW DOWNTURN: Manufacturing in Taiwan contracted as production and demand slumped, while growth in chip exports last month eased in South Korea World chip sales growth has decelerated for six straight months in another sign that the global economy is straining under the weight of rising interest rates and mounting geopolitical risks. Semiconductor sales rose 13.3 percent in June from a year earlier, down from 18 percent in May, data from the global peak industry body showed. The slowdown is the longest since the US-China trade dispute in 2018. The three-month moving average in chip sales has correlated with the global economy’s performance in the past few decades. The latest weakness comes as concern about a worldwide recession has prompted chipmakers such as Samsung
Italy is close to clinching a deal initially worth US$5 billion with Intel Corp to build an advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plant in the country, two sources briefed on discussions said yesterday. Intel’s investment in Italy is part of a wider plan announced by the US chipmaker earlier this year to invest US$88 billion in building capacity across Europe, which is striving to cut its reliance on Asian chip imports and ease a supply crunch that has curbed output in the region’s strategic auto sector. Asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, the sources said the
Malaysia is scrambling to protect its assets as the descendants of the last sultan of the remote Philippine region of Sulu look to enforce a US$15 billion arbitration award in a dispute over a colonial-era land deal. In 1878, two European colonists signed a deal with the sultan for the use of his territory in present-day Malaysia — an agreement that independent Malaysia honored until 2013, paying the monarch’s descendants about US$1,000 per year. Now, 144 years later after the original deal, Malaysia is on the hook for the second-largest arbitration award on record for stopping the payments after a bloody incursion