Homebuyers expect housing prices to drop next quarter and sellers might need to cut prices by more than 10 percent to facilitate transactions, a quarterly survey released yesterday by Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) showed.
Forty-three percent of prospective buyers anticipate housing price corrections in the second quarter, suggesting an increase of 10 percentage points from three months earlier, while people with price hike expectations fell from 32 percent to 26 percent, Evertrust research manager Daniel Chen (陳賜傑) said, citing a survey of 1,239 people between Feb. 21 and March 5.
Chen attributed the sentiment retreat to lingering loan restrictions on the part of domestic lenders and expansive credit controls that the central bank introduced in September last year to cool the market.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
Fifty-seven percent responded that the tightening measures dampened their purchasing interest, with 9 percent ditching purchasing plans altogether, he said.
Housing transactions might total 136,000 to 146,000 units in the first half of this year, shrinking 17 to 23 percent from the same period last year, Evertrust general manager Yeh Ling-chi (葉凌棋) said, adding that deals fell 25 percent in the first two months of this year from the same period last year.
Houses priced below NT$20 million (US$604,504) became mainstream across Taiwan as investors fled the market, leaving first-home buyers and people with real demand to underpin transactions, Yeh said.
A 5 percent to 10 percent price drop would prompt 20 percent of prospective buyers to join the market and a 10 to 15 percent concession would motivate 29 percent of prospective buyers, he said.
“The findings render wild cuts of up to 30 percent on the part of buyers unlikely to close deals,” he said. “A tug of war over house values between sellers and buyers has slowed the market.”
As a result, the number of houses available for sale has spiked by double-digit percentage points across Taiwan for the past six months, he said.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
RSS