This one’s not an apartment, but Jesus. The last couple of photos in particular.
The description says 房東會打掃亁淨. I wonder why they didn’t do that before taking photos. 
I was going to look for some more, but 591 is being extremely slow for me today for some reason and I don’t have the patience to keep waiting for images to load.
That “kitchen” and “bathroom” . . . 
We may have a challenger here to @Steve4nLanguage 's nominee for the hellhole crown!
Guy
Usually real estate agents will hire professionals to photograph the property for sale, because believe it or not, it makes a HUGE difference as far as attracting buyers. It goes without saying that the realtor will clean the place up too. Either the realtor’s lazy, or that people don’t buy these houses for their condition, but rather their location. I mean how else can you explain paying nearly half a million US for a bunch of disgusting catboxes stitched together? Either the new owner is going to just completely redo the entire place if they are living there, or they’re willing to wait the 20+ years for it to be knocked down and have something brand new built over?
It puts those leaning towers into perspective, what if it’s because the developers/landlord colluded together to accelerate those urban renewal projects?
Have you been following the discussion at all? What we’re talking about in this thread is exactly the opposite. You commented above, in case you’ve forgotten the topic already.
Why on earth would I not believe that? It’s pretty obvious and you don’t need to explain it to people. Again, that’s the point of this thread. We’re talking about this because we think it’s baffling that people post photos like then when trying to rent/sell apartments. We’ve also had the same discussion about your guitar photos – that they should look attractive (or at least not off-putting with garbage etc. in the background)…
I don’t know what “catboxes” or “those leaning towers” are referring to, so no comment there.
What I was wondering is why they DONT do that, not saying that they do.
Maybe because people who buys these properties don’t care about the condition, they just want the location.
Leaning tower as in you know that building in Dazhi and recently, Sanchong leaning because of nearby construction?
I don’t know, but the ones I’ve seen and was talking about were for rent not buying, so not useful for investment. Maybe for the ones being sold though. I’ve never looked through the sales listings, just rentals.
Oh, okay, those ones. I didn’t really follow the story and don’t know why they leant over.
Given how crap the rental yield is in Taiwan, why would landlords even want to put in the effort to take good photos? I mean properties costing half a millions US rents for like 15,000nt a month. Those photographers don’t work for free you know… Most landlords I dealt with in Taiwan simply absolutely do not want to spend money on the property.
As for properties for sale, based on the listing posted in this thread, it doesn’t look like they put in much effort in it either. I’ve seen several properties asking ridiculous prices that look like crap as well.
I used to live in one of those so called 陽台 balcony… The landlady literally just put a door in it, two planks -one as “bed”, not big enough even for me, and one as “desk” or “table” or general throw it all. At least it was ventilated. And it had both location and price. Oh and a restroom two floors down.
So any good landlord would salivate at that place, subdivide it into 5 rental “units” -I don´t dare to call them room- maybe 6 or 7 depending on what can be fit into the “balcony”.
As a one floor it can also be rented out as commercial property, set up a restaurant. I bet it was used as one before looking at the condition of the floors/walls/etc.
I would bet you can put 12 people semi comfortably there, 15 if you push it. I´ve seen it before.
That said, even in the fourth world country where I was born they have written laws on how many square meters per person is the minimum allowed for human habitat…
If the next buyer will likely gut and renovate their new apartment (I understand that’s pretty common here), maybe the exact interior doesn’t matter so much as the location and price etc. I still don’t get why they’d take pictures with a load of junk, dirt, and garbage still there though. 
I understand they count not only a percentage of the land the land the place stands on, but also the common areas, including lobby, stairwells, corridors, etc.
I heard this is quite common with those migrant workers, they put them up in very finely divided units, or have like 4 or 5 people living in a 4 ping room or something. So they are literally flushing the toilet all the time just due to the number of people sharing a bathroom. Saw a news story about this, someone bought a unit and then the owner upstairs divided the unit up for migrant workers to live there, and guy was going crazy hearing the toilet flush every few minutes, 24 hours a day.
I’m sure there’s written laws about this but who’s enforcing that? It’s basically the wild west.
London must count as a 5th world country then.
1500 pound per month.
Seriously?? I wouldn’t want to pay more than 3000nt per month for this. The bed looks disgusting too.
All the amenities…
The poll has now been closed. Every single forumosan who voted went with “When property owners post hellish photos of their properties, they are: Blissfully unaware that their photos show their properties as hellholes.”
I did not vote (I set up the poll) but damn that is a lot of hellhole to not see. 
Guy