Exploring Taiwan Housing Prices Beyond Taipei!
Previously, I analysed about 10 years of Taipei housing prices (in Mandarin) from the data released by the Taiwan government, and also a few other pieces on the Singapore housing market (here , here and here). In my Taipei analysis, I found that none of the Taipei regions had normally distributed housing prices, ie, all of them had housing prices with outliers that had very high prices for their own regions. Naturally, the data showed that older regions had generally cheaper home prices, while the Daan region was consistently the most expensive region in Taipei across the 10 year data set. I also found that some housing policies introduced in June 2011 by the Taiwan government had a negative impact on overall housing prices in Taipei, although housing prices seem to be slowly climbing back up in recent times.
In this article, I decide to expand my analysis to other Taiwan cities, and also to write my article in English, as I can produce my analysis much faster if I do so. The cities that I want to compare with Taipei are Taichung, Hsinchu and Kaohsiung. From my internet research, these are the Traditional Chinese names of the regions and their associated cities:
- Taichung — 中區, 東區, 西區, 南區, 北區, 西屯區, 南屯區, 北屯區, 豐原區, 大里區, 太平區, 清水區, 沙鹿區, 大甲區, 東勢區, 梧棲區, 烏日區, 神岡區, 大肚區, 大雅區, 后里區, 霧峰區, 潭子區, 龍井區, 外埔區, 和平區, 石岡區, 大安區, 新社區
- Hsinchu — 竹北市, 竹東鎮, 新埔鎮, 關西鎮, 新豐鄉, 峨眉鄉, 寶山鄉, 五峰鄉, 橫山鄉, 北埔鄉, 尖石鄉, 芎林鄉, 湖口鄉
- Kaohsiung — 鹽埕區, 鼓山區, 左營區, 楠梓區, 三民區, 新興區, 前金區, 苓雅區, 前鎮區, 旗津區, 小港區, 鳳山區, 林園區, 大寮區, 大樹區, 大社區, 仁武區, 鳥松區, 岡山區, 橋頭區, 燕巢區, 田寮區, 阿蓮區, 路竹區, 湖內區, 茄萣區, 永安區, 彌陀區, 梓官區, 旗山區, 美濃區, 六龜區, 甲仙區, 杉林區, 內門區, 茂林區, 桃源區, 那瑪夏區, 高雄市
Don’t worry if you don’t know these regions. Neither do I. I just need them to identify housing transactions for my cities of interest.
Housing market across the four cities
Comparing the overall housing prices across the four cities in the past ten years, the other three cities also have many outlier home prices. Hsinchu (新竹) had the lowest range of housing prices (Hsinchu didn’t have homes above 1 billion NTD). Taichung (台中) and Kaohsiung (高雄) had some outlier home prices that are higher than Taipei (台北), with Kaohsiung having lesser of such outlier home prices than Taichung. However, Taipei generally had more expensive homes than Taichung and Kaohsiung, as shown by Taipei’s thicker boxes in both their overall and per square metre prices.
Just from this view, it seems like Hsinchu has the lowest overall housing prices as a city compare to Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung, while Taipei and Taichung have higher housing prices than Kaohsiung.
Regions in each city
Next, I compare housing prices across different regions within each city. To reduce the effects of small samples influencing the comparison, I removed regions with less than 1,000 transactions in the past 10 years. Below is a summary of the basic descriptive statistics for the top 10 city regions, ordered by their median overall prices and median price per square metres.
Looking at Table 1, we can see that the top 10 most expensive regions based on median price per square metres are all in Taipei (台北). The most expensive non-Taipei region based on median price per square metres is Nantun in Taichung (台中 — 南屯).
When we look at the top 10 expensive regions by overall median prices, we do find Hsiunchu’s Zhubei (新竹 — 竹北) region taking the 10th spot, while the other Taipei regions again hold the other top 9 spots in this list.
Overall, Taipei regions still have the higher median prices and median per square metre prices among the selected major cities in Taiwan. This means that even the previously identified affordable Taipei regions like Wanhua (萬華) and Datong (大同) regions have higher median prices compared to other major cities.
I understand that Hsinchu is home to Taiwan’s very strong semiconductor industry, the semiconductor industry produces parts for Apple iPhones. And I understand Taiwanese semiconductor engineers really earn a lot, a lot more than their median incomes. According to my Taiwanese friends, Hsiunchu’s unique position in Taiwan’s economy is one of the reasons why Hsinchu had higher demand for quality housing, and thus, higher home prices in general.
So far, the aggregated analysis of median housing and per square metre prices only indicate that Hsinchu’s Zhubei (竹北) housing prices may be slightly expensive, the data and analysis so far does not provide a compelling argument that Hsinchu housing prices are expensive, especially when compared to Taipei, Taichung and even Kaohsiung’s housing prices.
However, I do feel that my current analysis is not complete, and I want to dig deeper into this as I do more data exploration.
Time Series plots
One issue with my current analysis is it aggregating home prices across the entire ten year period could potentially mask changes in the housing prices within the ten years. Hence, like what I did for my Taipei housing analysis, I will plot the median home and price per square metres values for the regions across these four cities, across the ten year span.
To make the time series charts readable, I am only plotting selected specific regions of interest. The first obvious pattern from the chart (Figure 4) is that Taipei’s Daan region (大安) indeed has the most expensive homes in Taiwan when comparing median housing prices across the entire ten year period.
However, when we zoom in into certain regions, we do see some regions with higher median housing prices than Taipei Wanhua (萬華) since 2020, namely Taichung Nantun (南屯), Hsiunchu Zhubei (竹北), Kaohsiung Gushan (鼓山) and Kaohsiung Niaosong (鳥松). If we are Figure 5, it does suggest that not all regions in Taipei are more expensive than other regions in other cities, including the Hsiunchu’s Zhubei region.
Another interesting pattern I found in my data is that Taichung has had some visible increase in median housing prices, with some regions’ prices doubling in the past ten years. Figure 5 shows some of the selected Taichung regions where prices have increased considerably in the past ten years. Granted that this may be seen as a grow from an initial low base of housing prices in Taichung, and that Taichung housing prices may still look cheaper overall, a doubling of housing prices for any region within ten years still is a steep increase regardless.
I was curious about some research done on Taiwan’s housing prices, and this is one of the more interesting articles that I have found. The article was written in November 2021, and does cover quite extensively on some of the reasons behind Taiwan’s housing price increases around that period of time, which also matches with some of the housing price increases that I have identified. Interestingly, different regions seem to have their own issues and factors that could have potentially led to increases in their region’s housing prices.
Housing nuances in Taiwan (1) — Common estate amenities
One quirky thing about Taiwan’s housing is that common estate amenities (公共建設) are counted into the transaction price. This means in Taiwan, if you are paying for a house of 100 metres squares of space, the actual space of your house may only be 70 square metres. This is because public spaces within your estate, such as corridors, lifts, gym and swimming pools are also included into the calculations of floor area that you are purchasing. According to my Taiwanese friends, newer housing apartments in Taiwan have an average ratio of 30–35% that is allocated to common estate amenities! In fact, some Taiwanese prefer to buy older apartments because they usually have less common amenities, which means you will have a bigger house if you were to buy newer apartment with the same size, because the new apartment will have more common amenities. Learning about this got me to think if the price per square metre costs I got from the agency counts for this, and if so, how it would affect my analysis. Unfortunately, I am unable to confirm whether that data that I got accounts for this or not.
Housing nuances in Taiwan (2) — floor area of measurement, Ping
Another thing about the Taiwan housing market I learned is that Taiwanese typically use a different area measurement called ping. Ping is actually a legacy system from Japan, who occupied Taiwan from 1895–1945, and one ping is the area of one standard Japanese tatami mat. I learned about this when I was discussing my analysis with my Taiwanese friend. We ended up having to constantly convert to our preferred costs per area unit measurement to allow us to have a decent conversation on property prices across countries.
As mentioned in the free open source tool I built to explore Singapore historical housing prices from the start of 2022, Singaporean property developers typically use square feet in their marketing collaterals, even though official area measurements from government agencies are in square metres. If I were to do any cross country comparisons and analyses, I would have to converting numbers from these different country regions into a single metric, including deciding on the currency that I want to do my comparison on.
Conclusion
My analysis has brought me to interesting places (pun intended), from better understanding the overall Taiwanese housing market to furthering my discussions on socio-economic and cultural nuances of the Taiwanese society with my Taiwanese friends. I always stress that data analysis has to be done with context and domain knowledge. Trying to understand the Singapore and Taiwan housing market with the data I had, without understanding the nuances of these two societies, would easily skew analyses and interpretations of my numbers.
Being mindful of the content and nuances also allows me to be wary of my own blindspots, and it allows me to be open to new ideas and views that I may never previously realise. At the end of the day, I feel that every analysis that I do is a journey of exploration and discovery itself, and that there is so much more that I can learn from everyone around.
I hope this was an interesting read to anyone who has read all the way to the end. It was definitely an interesting piece of writing for me as I do this second deep dive into the broader Taiwan housing market.
