Renting a warehouse in Taipei

Does anyone know how easy it is to rent a warehouse in Taipei or the surrounding area? I’m interested in finding something to convert into a live/work/studio space, and potentially a gallery. I’m from the bay area and lots of people do this in Oakland - is anyone doing it here? How much would something like this cost per month?

Thanks!

I don’t think you really get the difference. This might work outside of Taipei, such as I know it would work in Changhua, but in Taipei warehouses are either sheetmetal shacks or wide open buildings in relatively nasty parts of town. You might also look into chang3fang2 廠房 which is a house that also has a factory attached.

I’m sure you can find something and I would suggest www.591.com.tw. It’s what I’m using to look for places. Good luck

Thanks for the info - good website btw. As far as nasty parts of town go, I’m from Oakland so nothing in Taiwan is really gonna intimidate me.

I’m also interested in doing this. Badbug, were you able to discover anything?

I tend to agree with Okami on this. Warehousing space in Taiwan is not like the great old-school early 1900s industrial brick spaces with vast high ceilings, quirky freight elevators, and enormous windows. Aside from the great loft spaces in New York, I had a friend who snagged an absolutely beautiful place in Cleveland overlooking the Cuyahoga River and a stone’s throw from the Flats. But this is a legal forum, and so I’ll toss in my 2 cents based on what I’ve seen from the lawyer guy perspective.

Over the years, I’ve had to factor the crappy level of private warehousing into our casework with the assumption that evidence stored for too long in a local warehouse may be useless when it comes down to the trial. Rats, water leaks, continual dampness, etc. are some of the normal issues that make “warehouse” spaces unfit for living in. As one investigator once told me, his company had put away a whole bunch of counterfeit automotive components in a warehouse and when the case went to court the evidence was retrieved and nothing was left but a few shreds of packaging and a lot of rat turds. In the midst of the Body Worlds copyright case against an imitative show, I was hugely relieved when the Ministry of Justice made the defendants take charge of storage of the 6 plastinated bodies at issue in that case. Since that time, the Ministry of Justice has been quite good about allowing rightsholders to use its own very clean warehouses (the sort that don’t have lots of rats), but I digress as those are not available for rent or purchase!

Many local businesses often don’t go to the warehouses and, instead, just fill up empty apartment spaces with their goods – which is why a certain number of “warehouse” raids involving counterfeit goods over the years have involved going with the police into office and residential properties that have been filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves, crawling over giant sacks of fake clothes, etc. You can fit a million bucks worth of fake clothes (even at cheapo fake shirt rates) in a fairly modest bit of converted real estate.

So my recommendation for trying to emulate loft-style warehouse living without the downsides? Get a place with a rooftop structure. Those rooftops have also sometimes been used as warehouses, factories, offices, etc. in years past, and quite a few have open floor plans. My first place upon moving to Taiwan was one of these – a former rooftop lamp factory and office space that had great natural light, was relatively clean and dry, lots and lots of electric outlets, and was devoid of interior walls but for the bathroom nook. If somebody tells you that it’s “not really a warehouse”, explain your home’s colorful history to him.

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Consider the climate.