Property transactions last month totaled 18,565 units in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, representing an increase of 8.6 percent from October, as builders wrapped up construction and turned over ownership to buyers ahead of the year’s end, brokers said.
However, the volume represents a 28.5 percent plunge from November last year, as interest rate hikes and economic uncertainty slowed purchase decisions.
Construction on presale housing projects in Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung and Kaohsiung were completed and delivered, bolstering the number of deals to 1,999 units, 3,724 units, 4,286 units and 2,708 units respectively, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
Property transfers in New Taipei City reported a 10 percent rise to 4,238 units, and shrank 0.7 percent to 1,610 units in Tainan, Chen added.
Taiwanese developers often aim to complete projects by the year’s end to meet buyers’ needs and strengthen annual financial statements.
The housing market has not been spared from an economic slowdown in Taiwan and heightened fear of recession in the US and Europe, where central banks are raising interest rates to tame inflation despite job losses and economic downturns.
Transactions in the first 11 months of this year fell 7 percent from a year earlier, and the pace of retreat has been widening each month, Chen said.
The decline is set to persist in light of growing mortgage burdens, softening GDP growth and a negative wealth effect linked to TAIEX corrections, Chen said.
Taiwan’s central bank has hiked interest rates three times this year and is widely believed to make another increase later this month.
The decline is most evident in Kaohsiung and Tainan at 14.3 percent and 12.4 percent respectively, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) lead researcher Mandy Lang (郎美囡) said, but added that it is partly due to a high base last year.
The housing market in southern Taiwan enjoyed a two-year boom on the back of investment and expansion plans of local chipmakers and international equipment suppliers.
The property fever subsided after local tech firms cut and postponed capital spending due to order cancelations and sluggish end-market demand, Lang said.
H&B Business Group (住商不動產) research director Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨) said the lack of consensus over house prices have also dragged transactions.
Large developers have deep pockets and tend to hold firm on prices, as this strategy has paid off in the past, Hsu said.
UNCERTAINTIES: Exports surged 34.1% and private investment grew 7.03% to outpace expectations in the first half, although US tariffs could stall momentum The Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast to 3.05 percent this year on a robust first-half performance, but warned that US tariff threats and external uncertainty could stall momentum in the second half of the year. “The first half proved exceptionally strong, allowing room for optimism,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “But the growth momentum may slow moving forward due to US tariffs.” The tariff threat poses definite downside risks, although the scale of the impact remains unclear given the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s policies, Lien said. Despite the headwinds, Taiwan is likely
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
READY TO BUY: Shortly after Nvidia announced the approval, Chinese firms scrambled to order the H20 GPUs, which the company must send to the US government for approval Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) late on Monday said the technology giant has won approval from US President Donald Trump’s administration to sell its advanced H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) used to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to China. The news came in a company blog post late on Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run China Global Television Network in remarks shown on X. “The US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said. “Today, I’m announcing that the US government has approved for us
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
RSS