Finding an apartment

Woo hoo! I have just done my last commute from the boondocks to Taipei. I have been staying with my in-laws for the past 2 months in a small town called Zai Chiao. They operate a hotel and conference centre and I have I have enjoyed living there, but each day I have been travelling by train from Zhunan to Taipei, then by subway to Neihu where my office is located. The 6 hours per day of commuting is now that is at an end.

I signed a lease on an apartment yesterday and I am moving in tomorrow.

Finding an apartment has been an experience. We considered buying a property, but the cost of homes in Taipei compared to the rental prices is way out of whack, so it seems better to rent at this stage. I read an article that said you would have to rent your investment property out for over 50 years just to get your money back. The investors are happy enough to invest the money, get the capital gain as the property goes up in value and use the rent to offset some of the expense.

When looking for the property we made a list of things we wanted such as: be located close to an MRT train station, close to my office, close to schools, minimum of 3 bedrooms, ideally have a designated car parking space, space to park the motor bike, and so forth.

On the most part when living in Taipei you are generally looking at small apartments, unless you want to spend more. We saw a couple of very large places with 5 bedrooms, but these larger places were old and grotty. I prefer “small, new and modern” to “big, old and grotty”.

When looking at apartments the floor space is measured in “ping”. According to the results of a google search I performed, 1 ping = 3.3 square metres. One thing to be wary of is that sometimes people quote a larger ping than you actually have because they are also incorporating common areas such as the lift foyer.

When searching for an apartment we had a look at a few real estate agents, but found online to be a much better way to search and compare. The website that we used was www. rent.591.com.tw . My wife is Taiwanese and can read Chinese no problem, but I was able to look at apartments myself online using the Google Translate option. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to get a good understanding of what’s on offer. There are real estate agents that speak English and specialise in helping westerners with their accommodation needs. We did not use these so I cannot comment on these, however I suspect that you would be paying a premium going through these guys.

We were looking for an apartment in the Neihu area. Most 3 bedroom apartments in this area seem to vary from NT$25,000 to $40,000 per month. Also they want 2 or 3 months rental as a security deposit. There are two types of apartment buildings: ones with a lift and ones without. If you are renting in a non lift building the higher the floor, the lower the rental fee. Non lift buildings are meant to be no higher than 6 floors, but that’s not always the case.

Neihu is about 5 kilometres from central Taipei and is the home of the Neihu Technology district where many of the household hi-tech firms are based. Firms such as Acer, Asus, BenQ, etc etc. It also where I have my office located.

Once we had our shortlist of apartments decided, we then printed out the details, rang the owners or agents and made a time to go and inspect the properties. When I say “we rang the owners and agents” I mean my wife did. All communications were in Chinese. So if you can’t speak Chinese it will be very helpful if you have a friend who speaks Chinese to help you.

For 2 days we ran around from place to place checking each property out. We did not find a place that had everything we wanted. There was always one or two things that were missing. I am sure we could have got everything we wanted if we were prepared to pay more, but we were working to a budget.

Once we had it down to the final 2 properties I then took some time to walk around the neighbourhoods to see what they were like, what shops and facilities were there. I also used Google Maps and the satellite view as well to assist.

The place we ended up with was a compromise...

On the positive side it is a brand new fully refurbished apartment, clean and modern with 3 large bedrooms, close to schools, and it is just 2.5 kilometres from my office. With 3 bedrooms we should be able to squeeze friends and family from overseas in for a short time, should they decide to come and visit us.

On the OK side of things it is 1.5 kms from a MRT station, it’s on the second floor (ground is considered first floor in Taiwan) in a non lift building. There is no actual designated car park, but there is a public car park 200 metres away, where we can pay NT$2,500 per month to park a car. It is 28 ping in size which is approximately 92 square metres. They achieve this by having one largish room that has the kitchen at one end and we need to fit the lounge/dining in the same room.

We are located in a laneway off a large road. There are a few restaurants within 50 metres of our home and a Family Mart convenience store (similar to 7 eleven) just 100 metres away. I have not seen them yet but apparently there is a supermarket and a traditional market within 5 minutes walk of the place too.

On the negative side there is no window in the master bedroom, and limited natural light in general.

Overall I like the place and am looking forward to living life as a Taipei-an and a Neihu-an. The apartment as shown in the photos here is empty and as such looks kind of spacious. Tomorrow when we move all our stuff in that arrived from Australia in a container, we will see how much fun living in a shoebox really is.

One good thing to know is that you can generally haggle on the rental price. Our apartment was advertised at $23,000 per month and we haggled down to $20,000. We also had them make a few changes to improve the facilities. The other thing is that if you are an expat the accommodation can be paid by your employer and is a tax deductable expense. There are some rules and regulations around this, such as the lease had to be in the name of my company. Doing this put the rent up from NT$20,000 to 22,000 per month, but in the end being paid out of pre-tax dollars will make it cheaper. I will write more about the Taiwanese tax situation in a separate post.

The lack of car space is not too much of problem as we have decided to see if we can live without a car. To catch a taxi the 1.5 kms from the apartment to the MRT is NT$75, once you are on the MRT you can travel via train to almost anywhere. If we need to do a big shopping trip once again we can use a taxi, and it will be way cheaper than owning a car. Petrol costs around NT$30 per litre, just a little bit cheaper than back home in Australia. Whilst we won’t have a car, I will have my motor scooter which I will use to travel to and from work, and for small errands.