I hear that there are nice areas in Yangmei to live. I believe that is a bit further south than Xindian …
Better not even mention Yangmei to poor waterless Mr. He, who is now sensibly fixing his spyglass on the greener pastures of Hsintien.
And Mr He, I had about 40 well decorated ping and a garden plenty big enough for barbies for NT$15,000 a month about eight years ago, and I suspect you could get the same for a wee bit less now.
Omni wrote [quote]Better not even mention Yangmei to poor waterless Mr. He who is now sensibly fixing his spyglass on the greener pastures of Hsintien (Xindian).[/quote]
Green because it rains all the bloody time; enough to make a bloke pine for the dry sunny clime of Chiayi. 
Where’s this Garden City place? Anywhere else up in the hills a bit. I’ve long though Mengmenggu would be nice.
Brian
Xindian is closer to the bright lights… I am happy here, but looking around is never bad. If I can get the same as I have here in a gated community in Xindian, then it might be worth a thought.
I hear that WuLai is nice too.
Living in Hsindian is pretty convenient
-MRT is usually within walking distance
-Several quiet places
-The highway is not really a problem
-Perhaps North of Hsintien might be better
because of its proximity to Taipei
My wife was telling me tonight that there are plans to develop Xindian. Apparantly it is becoming known as a desirable place to live. The plans are to develop the area into a livable science park of sorts. Already there are computer factories and offices just over the bridge from Mucha into Xindian on Mushing Road. Probably they are finally going to build some places in the mountain road you can take to shortcut your route from Mucha to Xindian. They’ve had a retaining wall up there for years. A small stream of water leaks out in one place and people drive up to wash there cars with the free water every weekend. I once saw a man shampooing his dog.
Anyway, fabulous views up there. But I would never buy a place as I’ve seen how unstable the ground is.
By the way, anyone ever live in Shenkeng. I am starting to wonder if I shouldn’t start looking east instead of west. Shenkeng has quite a few complexes in the mountains (and a few well-preserved traditional brick homes too, though I’m sure the wife would shudder at the thought of this). The views are great and you are very close to trails and areas wholly undeveloped heading toward Pingxi or Huangdidian. There’s even a clean waterfall you can shower under only 15 minutes off the main road. And Mucha and the MRT are only a 15 minute drive away.
Good stinky tofu too. 
Well… I wuz thinking about that because I am willing to consider living in a place, which is quiet, has bbq patch, and which costs less than NT$1,100 when you want to take a cab from vibe and home.
I need informatin about living in the Xiaobitan area.
I have looked at places near the MRT stop and the complex near Tesco.
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Any experiences with taking the bus 906 909 or 905 into Taipei, TunHua North road? It seems to be a pretty fast commute the three times I tried it. Much more convenient than taking MRT.
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Anyone know of any rental agents in this area? I have done into several of the real estate companies including XinYi and YungChing (?) but they only sell houses.
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Rent seems to be much more reasonable than in Taipei. What kind of rent for a 1 or 2 bedroom unfurnished place?
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Where exactly is this all day Karoake singing? Don’t want to be in that area.
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Where is New Garden City?
Sorry for the double post. I intended to post this in the living in Xin Dian thread, but clicked the wrong button.
My wife and I have recently decided to buy a house in the Xindian suburb of Ankeng. This is the area around Ankang Rd if you head up past the other side of the Bitan Bridge. Ankang Rd itself is nto very nice, but there’s perhaps a dozen little communities (mostly houses - gated and ungated) up there.
We’ve decided on a small, basically ungated, community of houses called Taipie Xiaocheng (台北小城 - Taipei Town). I’m curious if anyone has any experience with this community or others in Ankeng.
We did look at other communities around Xindian, including up on Changchun Rd and on the road to Wulai such as New Garden City, which was mentioned earlier in this thread, but we liked Taipei Xiaocheng best.
Omni mentioned about New Garden City (花園新城)
We had a look up there. It is nice, but for some reason I can’t quite place, I prefer Taipei Xiaocheng. Garden City has really nice places. but others seem a little damp and dismal. Anyway, maybe you’re interested that when we went up there a couple of weeks ago, there were quite a few places for sale at the real estate office there, although I didn’t look closely. There was also a little development being sold by Rebar Rehouse. It wasn’t really independent townhouses, but not an aprtment block either. Rather a few buildings, each divided into about half a dozen apartment/townhouses. They were selling for around 100000 a ping if I remember correctly (about 40-60 ping places).
Brian
Do you think that there is a relation between those 2 events ? 
Jingmei is on the Taipei City side of the Jingmei river.
Xindian is in Taipei County; both are large areas.
Xindian is reputed to be one of the nicer parts of Taipei County.
Personally, I like living near one of the MRT stops,
though several of the bus lines are very frequent (e.g. 642).
Our experience was that you got twice the pings for
your money, compared to say, Gongguan area.
Not a lot of parks here. They roll up the sidewalks by 10PM.
Food is not bad, no decent western food, though that is
true of the entire island IMHO. Appalling steak houses here.
We’re near Dapinglin and yes during the morning commute
the MRT trains are full by the time they get here.
Yesterday, I went to XinDian with my bike in the hope to find :
- a nice place to leave with less polution and less noise.
- a appartment to rent in this place.
The only places I found to match my criterias were the moutains, but I could not find a place to rent. There was one exception : Someone told me that there is a place, but only for students. 
. Until now I was rejected many times because I am not a girl (pure sexisme, thank you), but yesterday it was the first time that I am been told “no” because I am not a student. Someone have an idea about the logic behind this ?
Anyway, I am a good guy, clean, and still looking for a place in XinDian. Just in case someone here know a place for me, please PM me. :help:
I have been looking at places around xiaobitan MRT. I liked the cleaner atmosphere and the nearness to the mountains, etc. I work in Taipei Tunhwa area so taking the MRT is quite inconvenient. It is a more direct commute using buses 909, 906, and 903 which run by xiaobitan MRT to dapinglin and then to Tunhua South/North Road. These buses are new and the drive is comfortable.
Do not like DaPingLin or ChiZhang area. So any info about the xiaobitan is appreciated.
Can you read Chinese? If not, take someone who can and visit the agents. Maybe you’ve done that already. Int he area that I was talking about - Ankeng, I saw a bulletin board with some places to rent. I remember that there were a couple of ‘taofang’ studios in the apartment blocks up Daguan(sp?) Rd. This bulletin board is just inside Chezi Rd that comes of Ankang Rd Sec 2, next to a bus stop.
Brian
Yes, I can read enough Chinese to understand. I have asked three or four agents in the area and called one recently and they all said they only buy and sell houses but do not have rentals.
I took 906 into AnKeng the other day and it didn’t leave a strong impression. Maybe I did not go far enough. I went on the road that is in front of Carrefour or RT Hypermart. Actually it seems that it is getting pretty distant for me though.
Yep, Ankang Rd, the main drag is pretty awful. The communities are all on the roads that come off these, and are quite different.
Certainly there are far fewer houses for rent than to buy.
Try this:
yungching.com.tw/CC2/CC_Default.asp
A quick look here turned up about half a dozen places in Ankeng communities, including one in Taipei Xiaocheng, which is where I want to buy.
Brian
There are several attractive communities off Ankang Rd.
A year or so back they started to market the development of a really big one, the name of which I can’t remember precisely, except that it features the words “sea” and “green”. My wife and I were interested by the ads, so we went to take a look with the parents-in-law and a couple of the wife’s siblings. The development looked like it would be pretty good, even if rather densely crowded, with a mix of semi-detached bieshus and a few apartment blocks, and pretty good amenities such as gym, pool, and so on (that are absolutely de rigeur these days).
We were interested only in the bieshus (houses), and after spending a lot of time looking at the showroom, models and plans, we found one that suited our requirements really well. It was located at what would be the quietest far corner of the development, in a semi-detached block of four (one on each corner) in a cul-de-sac, had four well-appointed floors above ground, a garage underground (in a communal car park), around 50 ping of floor space plus 20-something ping of garden. We negotiated what I considered was a very reasonable price of about NT$8.5 million, and said we would make our decision after thinking about it for a while.
We had two main misgivings that made us hesitate about buying: (1) The construction had not even begun – the only thing on the site was the showroom, and bulldozers were still at work shaping the landscape ready for construction to start. I can’t help being reluctant to commit myself to buying a property that still doesn’t exist, even though the developer was (according to my knowledgeable inlaws) one of the most reputable in Taiwan (which doesn’t necessarily say a lot). (2) Ankang Road, the only artery connecting the community with the city, is an absolutely terrible road that gets horribly clogged with traffic (it’s one of the names you hear most often if you listen to the traffic reports on the Chinese radio stations, and strikes me as being one of the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on here). The people marketing the place assured us that plans had been approved to build a wide new road running past the community and directly into the heart of downtown Taipei, and kept stressing that it would be just a 20-minute journey to 101, but I’m always highly sceptical about claims like that.
So after giving it some thought, we decided not to follow up on it. Interestingly, the marketing people didn’t bother to contact us (as they often do), indicating that the places there were selling very well and so they didn’t need to chase after customers. There was certainly a big crowd of prospective buyers there when we visited, and quite a lot of them appeared to be signing contracts of purchase. We’ve since heard that they did, indeed, sell very quickly, and the prices have already risen quite substantially – which makes us regret that we didn’t buy, as we could at least have been in line to make a tidy profit from reselling if we’d decided against making it our home.
I haven’t been out that way since then, but I’m quite curious as to how the development looks, as it must be close to completion by now (I’ve seen more ads, but they’re for phase two of the development). If they really do build that new road, it could be quite a nice place to live, and might be worth checking out for places to rent if that’s what you’re after (a lot of people buy into developments like that as investments, and put them up for rent as soon as they’re built, so there’d probably be a fair choice of places there available for renting).
[quote=“Snowdragon”]Yes, I can read enough Chinese to understand. I have asked three or four agents in the area and called one recently and they all said they only buy and sell houses but do not have rentals.
I took 906 into AnKeng the other day and it didn’t leave a strong impression. Maybe I did not go far enough. I went on the road that is in front of Carrefour or RT Hypermart. Actually it seems that it is getting pretty distant for me though.[/quote]
You could try Johnny Cheng at 0963-350-001. He is from LA and speaks English. Office number is (02) 2910 7811. His office right at Dapinglin MRT. We just found him at random, by stopping in at various real estate agents while wandering around the neighborhood. I had the impression that not all of the offices have rentals, but on average they might have 3 or 4 of them. The fee was 1 month’s rent, and we split that with the landlord.