Singapore, July 3 (CNA) Taiwan has been ranked 29th worldwide in a global real estate transparency index that says that although Taiwan's regulations are tight, improvements still need to be made in the visibility of information regarding sales transactions.

Among the 97 markets covered worldwide, Taiwan was rated as semi-transparent on a five-transparency-level rating -- high transparency, transparent, semi-transparent, low transparency and opaque -- and was in seventh place in the Asia-Pacific region, trailing Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, according to the survey jointly conducted by real estate service firms Jones Lang LaSalle and LaSalle Investment Management.

According to the survey, world's top 10 most transparent markets are the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, France, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.

Compared with other mature markets, house sellers usually cannot provide reliable and full information in Taiwan, China, India and other emerging countries in Southeast Asia, while transaction processes are not entirely open and fair, the report said.

Taiwan was ranked 16th globally in the regulatory and legal sub-index, behind only Singapore and Australia regionally, but its scores in the sub-indices of performance measurement, market fundamentals and transaction processes were not ideal.

The survey is issued biennially and the 2012 survey was the seventh of its kind. In the last survey, carried out in 2010, Taiwan was rated 33rd among 81 markets worldwide.

(By Lu Hsin-hui and Nell Shen)
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