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.
When an apartment comes up for rent in Germany’s big cities, hundreds of prospective tenants often queue down the street to view it, but the acute shortage of affordable housing is getting scant attention ahead of today’s snap general election. “Housing is one of the main problems for people, but nobody talks about it, nobody takes it seriously,” said Andreas Ibel, president of Build Europe, an association representing housing developers. Migration and the sluggish economy top the list of voters’ concerns, but analysts say housing policy fails to break through as returns on investment take time to register, making the
‘SILVER LINING’: Although the news caused TSMC to fall on the local market, an analyst said that as tariffs are not set to go into effect until April, there is still time for negotiations US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he would likely impose tariffs on semiconductor, automobile and pharmaceutical imports of about 25 percent, with an announcement coming as soon as April 2 in a move that would represent a dramatic widening of the US leader’s trade war. “I probably will tell you that on April 2, but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club when asked about his plan for auto tariffs. Asked about similar levies on pharmaceutical drugs and semiconductors, the president said that “it’ll be 25 percent and higher, and it’ll
CHIP BOOM: Revenue for the semiconductor industry is set to reach US$1 trillion by 2032, opening up opportunities for the chip pacakging and testing company, it said ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控), the world’s largest provider of outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) services, yesterday launched a new advanced manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia, aiming to meet growing demand for emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The US$300 million facility is a critical step in expanding ASE’s global footprint, offering an alternative for customers from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China to assemble and test chips outside of Taiwan amid efforts to diversify supply chains. The plant, the company’s fifth in Malaysia, is part of a strategic expansion plan that would more than triple
Taiwanese artificial intelligence (AI) server makers are expected to make major investments in Texas in May after US President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office and amid his rising tariff threats, Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association (TEEMA, 台灣電子電機公會) chairman Richard Lee (李詩欽) said yesterday. The association led a delegation of seven AI server manufacturers to Washington, as well as the US states of California, Texas and New Mexico, to discuss land and tax issues, as Taiwanese firms speed up their production plans in the US with many of them seeing Texas as their top option for investment, Lee said. The
RSS