Turbulence on the stock market has dampened interest in the property market as major real-estate brokers have seen the number of prospective buyers fall by more than 10 percent in the past three weeks.
Growing uncertainty over the economy at home and abroad cast another shadow over a housing market that has also been hit by a recent luxury tax as investors have pulled out.
Sinyi Realty Co (信義房屋), the nation’s only listed real-estate broker, saw the number of prospective buyers fall 10 percent this month, while the benchmark TAIEX shed 12.66 percent as fears grew of a double-dip global recession.
“The [TAIEX’s] wild swings prompted people to reassess their wealth and their portfolios,” Sinyi’s head researcher Stanley Su (蘇啟榮) said by telephone.
The cautious sentiment appeared at a time when the market has yet to recover from the implementation of the luxury tax, Su said.
The levy, which subjects houses resold within two years of purchase to taxes of between 10 percent and 15 percent, led to housing transactions falling by 20 percent in Taipei last month, compared with the previous month, according to city government statistics.
The number of property transfers last month stood at 3,618, the second lowest level this year after February, when the Lunar New Year shortened the number of working days, and it was close to the levels seen during the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
Trading was less affected outside the Greater Taipei area and Su attributed the gap to inflexible real estate prices in Taipei and New Taipei City (新北市).
“Sellers remain unwilling to lower asking prices, thanks to an excess of liquidity and low interest rates,” Su said.
Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), head of research at H&B Realty (住商不動產), the nation’s largest real-estate broker by number of franchises, said people looking for homes had declined 15 percent in the past three weeks, while luxury housing transactions had come to a standstill.
Houses priced NT$60 million (US$2.07 million) or more bore the brunt of the correction as potential buyers have probably incurred heavy financial losses on the stock market, Hsu said, adding that most prospective buyers for luxury homes have exposure to global equities and bonds.
The local bourse shrank by NT$762.8 billion in market value last week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed, while global equity market losses have amounted to US$8.6 trillion in the past four weeks, online news outlet Cnyes.com reported yesterday.
“Clients with assets in US dollars must have sustained considerable losses of late,” Hsu said by telephone. “The ongoing turmoil warrants asset relocation plans and many investors would like to increase their cash positions before the global picture becomes clearer.”
H&B has yet to spot prices falling despite dwindling transactions, while the price gap with the rest of the country has widened to 30 percent for homes in Taipei and 20 percent in New Taipei City (新北市), Hsu said.
Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋), the nation’s largest broker by number of outlets, including franchises and directly-owned branches, reported a decline of 15 percent in the number of prospective buyers in the past three weeks.
Evertrust associate manager Jeffery Huang (黃增福) said the uncertain global economic outlook was rubbing salt into the housing market’s wounds and they may need more time to recover.
“While inflationary pressures tend to boost real-estate prices, economic uncertainties do the opposite,” Huang said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day