The business climate monitor for presale residential projects and new houses in northern Taiwan last month turned “yellow-red,” the first signal indicating a boom in 16 years, My Housing Monthly (住展雜誌) said yesterday.
The total score of constituent measures stood at 52.6, rising from 45.1 in February and ending 15 consecutive months of “green” signals, which suggests steady growth, My Housing Monthly spokesman Chen Ping-chen (陳炳辰) said.
The impressive showing came after developers released NT$100 billion (US$3.09 billion) of presale projects in northern Taiwan to take advantage of the spring sales season, which started late last month and runs until the end of this month, Chen said.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
Projects in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水) and Sanchong District (三重), Taoyuan’s Gueishan District (龜山) and Hsinchu County’s Baoshan Township (寶山) are an easy sell, he said.
Favorable lending terms, chiefly interest rate subsidies for first-home purchases, also helped expedite transactions, he said.
The magazine said the measure on price concessions went down to 9.92 percent, as buyers were generally willing to increase their budgets, while sellers mostly refused to budge.
The reading on buying interest was little changed at 7.48, it added.
Chen said that the momentum would sustain through the first half of this year, as the new administration of president-elect William Lai (賴清德) would boost expectations of reforms.
Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋), the nation’s sole listed broker, arrived at similar conclusions in a report released on Wednesday, saying transactions of presale projects totaled 19,000 units in the first two months and generated NT$320.2 billion of sales.
The volume represented a sharp increase of 150 percent from a year earlier when the government’s plan to bar transfers of presale house purchase agreements sidelined developers and potential buyers, Sinyi research manager Tseng Ching-der (曾敬德) said.
The sentiment started to turn around in the fourth quarter of last year when exports, Taiwan’s main GDP growth driver, increased after several quarters of inventory adjustments, Tseng said.
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