Diagnoses and prescriptions clashed over how to restore the supply of non-apartment housing, such as villas and officetels. One side argued that tax and financial support along with regulatory easing is needed to revive new construction, while the other countered that there is no demand for non-apartments themselves, so increasing supply would have no effect.
At a public debate on real estate policy held on the 23rd, Jin Mi-yun, a professor at Myongji University's Graduate School of Real Estate, said that selective financial and tax support is needed to restore non-apartment construction.
In her presentation, Jin diagnosed that "permits and construction starts declined simultaneously from 2022, and non-apartment construction dropped significantly, especially after jeonse (a Korean lease system requiring a large lump-sum deposit instead of monthly rent) fraud eroded tenants' trust." She said, "Non-apartments are an important housing option that young single people and newlyweds can access with small deposits and monthly rent," expressing concern that this decline would ultimately translate into housing cost burdens for ordinary and middle-class households.
As an alternative, she proposed selective financial and tax support for units that can begin construction, along with increasing long-term rentals of new buildings by cultivating professional landlords to fill the "middle ground" between public rental housing and private multi-home ownership. She also stressed that public-interest and transparency obligations commensurate with the support would need to be imposed.
A presenter with a different perspective pointed out that current measures effectively lack a plan for private long-term rental supply, arguing that a separate "supplier financing" system needs to be institutionalized, including high-quality non-apartments at the level of officetels and mixed-use residential complexes. Because rental operators cannot immediately repay construction costs the way pre-sale developments can, the supply system that has relied on private lending has completely collapsed since 2022, he explained.
By contrast, Cho Jung-eun, chair of the Land and Housing Committee at the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice, offered a different diagnosis. "The average price of non-apartments is less than 300 million won, yet unlike apartments (in the range of 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion won), they are not absorbed by the market," he said. "The fundamental cause is that excessive tax benefits for single-home owners have concentrated demand solely on apartments." Kim Jae-kyung, director of the YouTube channel "Toomi TV," also countered, "Supplying villas lowers villa prices, so those who actually own villas do not welcome it," adding that increasing "effective supply" of new apartments that people actually want is more important for stabilizing home prices.
There were also voices pointing to institutional obstacles. Song Ju-hui, a licensed real estate agent operating in Sejong City, said, "As non-housing units such as officetels and urban-type residential housing are included in the home count, there are many properties that owners want to sell but cannot, because they are taxed heavily as multi-home owners." Sung Chang-yeop, chairman of the Korea Housing Landlords Association, said that in the non-apartment rental market, "guarantee enrollment criteria are pegged to the publicly assessed price, which is far lower than market value, making jeonse contracts themselves virtually impossible." He requested that the enrollment threshold be lowered and that a partial guarantee method be introduced instead of a full guarantee.
Online, many also raised opinions such as "non-apartments and detached houses should be excluded from the home count" or "private rental housing, such as construction rentals, should fill the gaps on small plots of land."
