Rising home prices and interest rates have prompted more people to sign up for 30-year mortgages to ease monthly debt payments, Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) said yesterday.
The average mortgage length climbed to a record-high 297 months, or 24.75 years, in the fourth quarter of last year, from 291 months in the previous quarter, indicating that 30-year mortgages have become mainstream, Sinyi Realty research manager Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said, citing data from the Ministry of Interior’s real-estate information platform.
That means that people who buy homes at age 40 would have to pay mortgages until they turn 70, Tseng said.
Photo: CNA
Older Taiwanese liked to pay mortgages ahead of schedule to save on interest payments, but people today prefer to take advantage of Taiwan’s low interest-rate environment and extend mortgages to own a home, the analyst said.
Interest rates on mortgages were about 1.3 percent for a long time before the central bank started to tighten its monetary policy in March last year to contain inflation, Sinyi said.
Twenty-year mortgages used to be the home loan of choice and many borrowers paid way in advance, consistent with Taiwan’s high savings rates, Tseng said.
The new mindset is especially evident among young buyers of new homes in New Taipei City, Taichung and Hsinchu City, where mortgages average more than 300 months, he said.
Newly completed homes have favorable lending terms with assistance from property development companies, he said, adding that young people consider 30-year mortgages acceptable.
Rising home prices make 30-year mortgages more attractive, as they require lower monthly payments, Tseng said.
The monthly payment for a NT$10 million (US$324,538) 30-year mortgage with an interest rate of 2.06 percent is NT$37,263, much less than NT$50,873 per month for a 20-year mortgage, he said.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS