Drove through Tianmu yesterday … my god, so many shops that are up for rent … what do landlords hope? That their property is going to be picked up for a big chain store outlet? I guess they hear to many stories about skyrocketing property prices, they rather leave it empty than rent out for a reasonable price to some one that tries to set up a business.
Shame, really … Tainmu looks like a commercial wasteland.
this is the taiwanese way, no?
there is loads of beautiful, prime property that is up for rent, but the owner wants another 5k or even 500 nt for it so rejected the offer
i think it would be more worrying if they started renting them out, then the property prices would crash, contruction cease and masive recession begin… build houses to improve the gloriarity of our father nation
A lot of Taiwanese families do this. They and their neighbors would rather sit on their houses and wait for housing developers to come and offer to buy up the entire lot to build skyscrapers, than to rent them out or sell them to those who actually want to run real businesses. I think the standard practice is that they are given free units in the complex according to the number of floors they owned in their previous building.
I have seen families who run out random herbal medicine shop or weird furniture stores that would get no business in (relatively) profitable areas, with their first-floor apartment full of crap that would never sell and looked like the merchandises were older than their little grandkids running around in the street. I’ve actually seen a family that cook and eat their own dinner out on the street because their run-down herbal medicine (or I guess “health hazard”) store was full of unmoved merchandise from the 1960’s.
It really makes you wonder why the heck people want to live this way. I mean, for Pete’s sake, you live in Taipei. Sell the goddamn apartment for 20 millions and the entire family can buy a house in Tainan and pretty much sit on their butt for the rest of their lives on the profits they can make now, but nooo…they’d rather live like people in third world countries just so that maybe one day 20 years from now they can get maybe 20% more compared to what they could get today on their heap of junk land.
…who gives a damn…Tianmu always was way over-rated anyway…
commercial properties there are through the roof (especially the Tianmu Dong Lu area). The new Sogo on Chungshan also means a lot less people will venture deeper into to Tianmu than in the past. Add that to the fact that so many expats have left, and it does indeed look bad.
Actually from my understanding, tenants that rent from you can be very destructive and skip out on the rent and damages without any legal recourse for the owner of the property. This is why my house wasn’t rented out again and was abandoned for all intents and purposes till we moved to Changhua and they had it cleaned up for us. It’s on a decent street with easy parking. I also think in a lot of cases you make out better renting rather than buying in Taipei. If it werem’t for the whole hukou system, I doubt most Taiwanese would own so many houses. There’s also the problem of clouded title due to lack of estate planning by people who think wills are bad luck. You can’t really sell or rent out a property without clear title too it. A great piece of property near my old kindergarten in Jingmei had this problem. It was eventually sorted out years later and they finished building on it about 1-2 years ago by a developer.
The places may also be owned by a family with other properties that are able to weather downturns in the economy with other properties they own and the fact that maintenance on places here is dirt cheap.
Some of the problem has to do with rent. But a greater problem for the area’s retailers is that the foreign and specialty goods that once made Tianmu a destination for shopping (and not just for foreigners) are now widely distributed throughout Taipei. Tianmu just doesn’t get the crowds of shoppers and, well, gawkers it used to. And then there’s the Taipei City Government’s policy of Xinyi über alles, which doesn’t help.
Mainly, though, it’s section 7’s retail that’s hurting. Section 6 is having fewer problems.
There’s a new “Tianmu card”, which offers discounts aimed at luring consumers. I hope it catches on.
As a location for residential housing, however, Tianmu is booming, with more and more high-end apartments being built. (The recent record-setting land sale was for a spot in Tianmu.) Unfortunately, a lot of them are high-rises that are changing the feel of the neighborhood for the worse, IMO. Still, if the people who end up living there shop in Tianmu, then all should be well. But I suspect they’ll just have their drivers take them to the department stores or even just to Xinyi…
My company has to deal with the Tianmu Landlords on a regular basis and the way my Taiwanese colleagues explain it is they’re living in a world from 20 years ago. They would rather sit on a property than give in on price, renovation, or tenant paying less than 2 years in advance.
If it wasn’t for TAS that whole area would be screwed.