Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities last month totaled 19,876 units, up 7.6 percent from a year earlier, as real demand held resilient, especially among first-home buyers, analysts said on Wednesday.
The volume represented a mild 2.4 percent decline when compared with a month earlier based on data from Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung, they said.
“Buyers with real demand quit staying on the side lines and took action after waves of unfavorable policy measures failed to trigger price corrections,” Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) head researcher Mandy Lang (郎美囡) said, referring to the central bank’s selective credit controls on local lenders, the government’s ban on the transfers of presale housing contracts and upcoming property tax increases.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
The recovery was most evident in Taoyuan, Taichung and Kaohsiung, where the number of deals increased 9 percent, 12.4 percent and 17.4 percent from a year earlier to 3,857, 3,880 and 3,146 units respectively, Lang said, adding that transactions in New Taipei City grew 4.1 percent year-on-year to 4,891 units.
Taipei and Tainan bucked the uptrend as their transactions slipped 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent to 2,268 and 1,834 units respectively, according to data on the separate local government’s Web sites.
The signs of stabilization failed to extend to Taipei because house prices in the capital have grown beyond the reach of first-home buyers, Lang said.
Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) shared similar observations, pointing out that first-home buyers contributed more than 50 percent of last month’s transactions and houses valued between NT$7 million and NT$20 million (US$221,344 and US$632,411) accounted for 60 percent of the total.
House prices within budget sit at the top of the list of concerns among first-home buyers, instead of popular locations, Sinyi research manager Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said.
The phenomenon explained why small apartments have been the mainstream product, he said.
H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) research chief Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨) said the government lent support by rolling out a new home loan program that offers interest rates of 1.775 percent on mortgages for first-home buyers.
The program comes with a loan limit of NT$10 million, a grace period of five years and a mortgage duration of 40 years, significantly lowering the thresholds of owning homes for young people, Hsu said.
The favorable lending terms would drive people to buy homes with rents increasing, she said.
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
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
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li