Changhua County has launched an upgraded online map of pre-sale housing projects, which is good news for buyers who have long been at the mercy of developers' sales pitches.

• The county land administration office put a free public platform online that lists new pre-sale projects, their locations, and the builders behind them.
• Buyers can now search by project name, builder, or town, and filter by several conditions at once before ever walking into a sales center.
• The old version was bare-bones; the new one adds keyword search and cross-filtering so people can narrow down options faster.
• The map also shows where new projects are clustered across the county — Changhua City, Yuanlin, Hemei, Lugang — which used to require digging through websites or trusting an agent.

Outlook: Better public data should shift a little bargaining power toward buyers, and other counties may copy the approach if it catches on.