The legislature yesterday approved amendments requiring the registration of actual real-estate sale prices to combat real-estate speculation, but fell short of revising rules to impose a tax on transactions based on prices registered.
Lawmakers across party lines praised the passage of the amendments to the Equalization of Land Rights Act (平均地權條例), the Real Estate Broking Management Act (不動產經紀業管理條例) and the Land Administration Agent Act (地政士法).
Under the amendments, land administration agents, real-estate buyers and real-estate brokers must register the actual value of property transactions within 30 days of a deal being closed, or face a fine of between NT$30,000 and NT$150,000.
The amendments could help contain housing speculation and assist the government in adopting effective measures to prevent dealers from spreading false information to the public, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Chieh-ju (陳節如) said.
“Transparency in the real-estate market is the most basic request of consumers,” she said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) described the revisions as “the first step to realizing housing justice,” even though “there is still a long way to go to” charge tax on capital gains arising from real property transactions.
“Passage of the three acts had nothing to do with levying capital gains on the sale of estate property because the amendments stated that the registered prices could not be used as basis to levy taxes until other related acts are revised,” Lai said.
Meanwhile, the legislature enacted the Housing Act (住宅法), which requires the central and local governments to regularly publish real-estate market statistics and adopt market-adjustment measures to stabilize the market when necessary and address problems arising from unbalanced supply and demand.
The act stipulated that 10 percent of “social housing” shall be rented to disadvantaged groups.
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National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
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