New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed.
The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said.
Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last year, an increase of 19 percentage points from 2019, Evertrust deputy research head Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said.
At the same time, apartments with two, three and four bedrooms or more shed 1.1 percentage points to 9 percentage points, Chen said.
The bigger the apartment, the higher the value, making them less likely to change hands, she said.
Likewise, apartments with one bedroom last year made up 10.9 percent of transactions in New Taipei City and underpinned 14.2 percent of deals in Taichung, representing advances of 7.7 percentage points and 10.8 percentage points respectively from five years earlier, Everturst said.
The trend was also seen in Taoyuan, Tainan and Kaohsiung, as well as Hsinchu county and city, although at a less conspicuous pace, it said.
Apartments with one bedroom contributed 8.4 percent of deals in Taoyuan, 8.8 percent in Hsinchu county and city, 9.6 percent in Tainan and 6.7 percent in Kaohsiung, it said, adding that the figures suggested gains of 3.5 to 8.1 percentage points.
Although apartments with two and three bedrooms remain the mainstream, a growing number of buyers, especially young people, have settled for less space so as to become homeowners, Evertrust said.
People in Tainan and Kaohsiung still favor apartments with three or four bedrooms given that they constituted 40 percent of deals, Chen said.
However, the preference could lose momentum if prices continue to soar and become untenable, she said.
Price increases have been less drastic in Taipei and New Taipei City in the past five years compared with elsewhere in Taiwan, but an already high base makes them beyond reach, Chen said.
Meanwhile, the number of old houses occupied by older people climbed to a record high of 690,500 in the third quarter of 2022, 75.42 percent of which had lone occupiers, raising safety concerns and the urgency of urban renewal projects, the Ministry of the Interior said.
The average age of residential property in Taiwan is 33 years, while the figure is 37.75 years in Taipei, the ministry said.
More old apartments would have lone occupants in light of a rapidly aging society and a low birthrate, it said.
The National Development Council has estimated that Taiwan would become a super-aged society next year when more than 20 percent of the population is aged 65 or older.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
RSS