Are empty homes in Taiwan really down? It's actually more serious than it looks

On 9/13, the Ministry of the Interior spoke with great fanfare about the drop in the rate of vacant houses, which is really a pot that can't be raised without opening it. There are currently two types of vacant house data: the first is the decennial "Population and Housing Census", and the second is the annual "Low-Usage (Electricity) Residential Survey", since the former survey interval is ten years, In the past, the vacancy rate was often discussed as a surrogate, because that's how it was available every year.

So if the population and housing censuses are not done every ten years, there is no need to use the low-use housing survey as vacancy data at all. When the two types of vacant house data conflict, the census of direct door-to-door survey is of course more accurate than the low-level usage survey that only looks at whether the average electricity consumption is lower than 60 degrees.

It just so happens that 2020 is the decennial census year, and the two data can be directly compared. The Ministry of the Interior said that the low-use residential vacancy rate in the second half of 2020 hit a record low of 9.96% (882,000 homes), so what about the 2020 census vacancy rate? It is 18.5% (1.664 million homes), almost double.

The Ministry of the Interior also said that the vacancy rate in the census will be relatively high, because the statistics of the General Accounting Office counts houses under repair, business trips, and vacation houses as vacant houses. But they may not know that this census is the first time to separate these "occasional self-occupied" holiday homes and grandparents' houses. If these are deducted, the vacancy rate is still 13.1% (1.175 million homes).

In any case, the census data shows that the problem of vacant houses in Taiwan is much more serious than what has been discussed in the past few years, and as Mr. Zhang Jin-e said, this is far higher than the international reasonable vacancy rate of 3% to 5%. standard.

As for the group of people who have left the house empty there? Is it a multifamily or a small family? In the next two days, the author will come to expose this matter, although I guess everyone can guess it.