Ah Huang, the Digitimes CEO, said the solution to Taiwan’s growing income inequality, is for the service sector to think of ways to make money off the tech sector.
But the reality is, tech workers are pouring money into real estate like everybody else who has the chance.
Therefore, Taiwan needs a robust real estate industry. Construction workers, operators, architects, civil engineers, real estate agents, lawyers, mortgage brokers, advertisers, valuers, surveyors, financial institutions staff.
I visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina almost every year, which has huge beach houses, and I see a ton of advertisements for real estate, and Home Depots everywhere. (By the way, does Taiwan have Home Depot or Lowe’s?)
Hong Kong’s main industries are real estate and securities. Not something to base your economy on, but if rich people do nothing but dump their money into housing, we should make the industry as sophisticated as possible, so we should learn from Hong Kong how to do it.
Taiwan currently has a housing surplus. In fact we have fifty years of available housing if we stopped all construction today and didn’t finish that which is in progress. The birth rate is tanking. Who is supposed to do all the building? Foreign workers/new immigrants? No thanks! Who are going to buy all these new condo units? The Chinese? No thanks!
Home Depot or Lowe’s in Taiwan? Laughable. Hardly anyone owns an actual home. All condos in high rises. We have a pathetic B&Q clone that only has condo stuff.
In Kaohsiung, half the building lights seem to be out at night. Drive around the peripheral areas, lots of them seem to be pretty empty pretty much all the time. Seems people are holding on to real estate expecting the prices to keep going up forever. Hard to know what will happen first, the bubble bursting or the ChiComs coming over. Given how much money the politicians have invested in real estate, we know the government isn’t going to solve the problem.
Perhaps it’s about people using property as leverage for loans? I dunno, it never seems to crash. Everything logical (population) about it crashing seems to have no effect.
Property market in many areas of Kaohsiung is about to boom. Due to the Tainan-Kaohsiung-Pingdung high-tech linky thing the government is throwing tax rebates at.
Nanzi or Qioatou there is an area of former farmland several cities blocks that is being developed. Definitely Nanzi is about to get a boom. But parts of Dashu, Dashe, Yanchao are like a ghost town. No industry, no highrises, not many businesses of any kind. Just a lot of shuttered row houses and a few retirees hobbling around
Fair enough, I was guessing in a kind of educated way. You know Kaohsiung considerably better than I do. I would still bet on property prices continuing to rise overall. Not the ballsiest of bets, admittedly.
Of course that happens, but eventually fundamentals come in. I think the fundamentals are for more property market growth. It’s not a bubble, it’s still supply and demand even with a falling population.
Then why can’t we get more public housing for the plebs who have no hope? (the majority of the population)
What difference does it make to those knobs who want to collect houses? The plebs are not going to be collecting houses any time soon, so it doesn’t effect their stupid little house collecting market. People just want a bloody place to live.
Looking on 591 a lot of rental places are labelled “social housing” and it is possible to get government money to help pay the rent if income is low enough
I think the people on the streets have underlying conditions, not many homeless here tho
If you want one of those public housing apartments, you gotta go on a waiting list which might take ten years. Sounds like people wanna live in them. So build more for christ sakes.
