For 18-year-old Eunho Kim, a freshman at Waseda University, the idea of owning a home in Korea someday already feels like a distant fantasy. Recent government data showing that it takes roughly 14 years of savings to afford an average house in Seoul only confirms what he already suspected.
"Owning a home in Korea seems to have become almost impossible for average people," Kim said. "The housing market, I feel, has been turned into a playground for rich investors, landlords, and corporations."
Max Yoo, a 14-year-old student at Fay School in Massachusetts, reached a similar verdict from a very different vantage point: four years younger, thousands of miles away, and not yet old enough to be thinking seriously about a mortgage. Still, when presented with the same 14-year figure, his answer echoed Kim's almost exactly. "The housing market has become too expensive for many ordinary people," he said. "It can take many years to save enough money to buy a home, even if one has a stable job. This can discourage people in my generation by illustrating that owning a house is more like a dream than a realistic goal." For two teenagers a generation and a continent apart, the question of whether they'll ever own a home in Korea already seems to carry the same answer.
Kim's frustration is not unusual among his generation. Korea's housing system is undergoing one of its most significant transformations in decades. Jeonse, the traditional lump-sum lease deposit system, is receding fast: Seoul apartment jeonse listings fell 22.2 percent in the year to June 2026, and monthly rent's share of Seoul rental transactions has climbed from about 40 percent in 2020 to 64.5 percent in the first nine months of 2025. Lending rules have tightened sharply as well: measures introduced on June 27, 2025 capped mortgages at 600 million won ($430,000) in the capital region, banned mortgage loans to multiple-home owners outright, and limited loan maturities to 30 years. Here, many young Koreans are being forced to reckon with a housing market that experts say is fundamentally shifting the path to homeownership away from the model their parents knew.
Mun-do Han, a real-estate scholar and founder of Korea's Rental Housing Research Institute, says that today's teenagers will likely face two very different paths to owning a home when they enter the workforce in 10 to 20 years.
The first runs through public housing: a resident starts in integrated public rental housing—state-built complexes, such as the 2,790 units across 19 complexes that the Korea Land and Housing Corporation plans to supply this year, that house low- to middle-income tenants under a single program—gradually accumulates equity or profit-sharing rights, and eventually converts that into full private ownership over the long term.
The second, more common path runs through the private market, with years of paying monthly rent while accumulating initial capital, followed by a 40- to 50-year mortgage to purchase a small home, or entering a lottery for public sale-housing.
Neither path is guaranteed to work, Han cautioned. Without meaningful progress on balancing development between the Seoul metropolitan area and the rest of the country, and without government control over housing-price appreciation, public rental policy will likely produce "partial success and partial failure at the same time" for the generation now coming of age.
The longer young people stay in rental housing, he said, the wider the asset gap between them and older, already-owning generations grows.
This concern echoes something Kim grapples with as he thinks about housing. "I think it is disgusting," Kim said, about reports that Korea's top 50 business groups collectively hold roughly 106 trillion won ($68.7 billion) worth of non-business-use real estate purely as investment assets. "Big corporations already control too much of Korea's economy, and now they are also taking homes away from ordinary people. Housing should be a basic right, not a tool for chaebols and wealthy investors to make even more money,” he added.
One of the most contested elements of the current housing overhaul is the government's gradual push away from jeonse toward monthly rent under the current Lee administration, driven in part by a surge in lease deposit fraud: the number of officially recognized jeonse-fraud victims has climbed to nearly 40,000 since a victim-relief law took effect in June 2023, and people in their 20s and 30s account for three-quarters of them.
Kim is skeptical that eliminating jeonse solves the underlying problem. "I understand that lease fraud is a serious problem, but removing lease does not really solve the root issue," he said. "It just pushes more people into monthly rent and makes their lives even harder. The government should punish fraud strongly, protect tenants, and stop treating ordinary people like victims of the market."
Han's analysis suggests a middle path rather than outright elimination. Rather than abolishing jeonse loans across the board, he argues they should be preserved specifically for young people and vulnerable low-income households, while eliminating what he calls "bad policy,” such as extending jeonse loans to landlords who already own homes.
The instinct to preserve rather than dismantle wasn't confined to expert testimony. Max arrived at much the same idea on his own, without any grounding in Korean housing policy beyond the numbers in front of him. "I don't think replacing it with monthly rent is like THE best solution," he said. "Monthly rent creates an extra financial worry for people because they have to make payments every month, which makes it harder to save money for the future." His conclusion tracked closely with Han's own prescription: "I think the government should focus on making it safer by strengthening tenant protections and preventing fraud rather than gradually removing the system. We should look for the best way that could satisfy most people's needs instead of taking the issue in an extreme way."
Despite the current administration's stated efforts to cool the market like reducing jeonse's role and tightening lending, Seoul housing and jeonse prices have continued to climb: in the first week of July alone, Seoul apartment sale prices rose 0.30 percent and jeonse prices 0.31 percent, both accelerating from the week before. Han attributes this largely to the prolonged suspension of transfer-tax penalties on multiple-home owners—a 20-to-30-percentage-point surcharge, legislated under the Moon Jae-in government in 2021, that pushes the top effective rate to 82.5 percent but has been suspended by enforcement decree since May 2022 and extended annually, first under Yoon Suk-yeol and initially under Lee as well, before Lee announced in January that it would finally be reinstated on Dec. 9—and to a supply shortfall stemming from the 2022 interest-rate shock, when rapid rate hikes and the Legoland developer default set off a credit crunch that disrupted construction project financing.
The combination, he said, has been damaging: insufficient new housing supply met the end of transfer-tax exemptions, which blocked multi-home owners from exiting the market, tightening inventory and applying psychological pressure on prices. He was also critical of current lending rules that cap loans at 600 million won for homes valued under 1.5 billion won but only 200 million won for homes over 2.5 billion won, calling the policy counterintuitive and effectively supportive of high prices rather than corrective.
In Han's view, the deeper flaw is that nearly every measure the government has deployed—loan caps, tax surcharges, transaction restrictions—targets demand while doing nothing to add homes. Suppressing buyers without expanding supply, he argues, only delays price increases rather than reversing them.
"Current policy is a policy that must fail without supply," Han said. "If it continues without supply, the market can only keep rising, and it will be difficult for the housing market to become one that favors young people."
For students like Kim and Max, the practical effect of a decade of policy churn—the exacerbation of the housing crisis, rising lease prices, and fewer transactions overall—is a growing sense that they will simply have to plan around a system rather than expect it to change in their favor, even if the two of them have landed in different places emotionally.
"I am worried that young Koreans will completely give up on the idea of owning a home," Kim said. "The system feels rigged because politicians, landlords, banks, and corporations all benefit from high housing prices. For my future, I think I need to build a stable career, save aggressively, avoid debt, and accept that the system will not help me unless major changes happen."
Max, four years younger and still years from having to make any of those decisions, voiced a similar worry but landed somewhere closer to resolve than resignation. "I am worried that by the time I have become an adult, buying a home will be even more difficult than it is today," he said. "Many young people like me in the future may have to rent for a long time or eventually move farther away from big cities if housing prices continue to rise faster than incomes." Where Kim described a system he felt powerless to change, Max framed his response around what he could still control: "I will have to study hard and learn how to manage my money wisely. Although I cannot control the housing market, I can still prepare myself financially for the future."
Han, though, does see a possible way out, but he stresses that it depends on political will rather than market forces alone. He points to two concrete measures: a sale-price ceiling for both public and private land distribution, and a decisive reduction—or abolition—of jeonse loans for anyone who is not young or low-income.
But he is equally clear that policy alone will not be enough. "Journalists also need to raise their voices in this public-opinion process," Han said. "Young people themselves also need to speak up."
Whether that public pressure materializes may determine which of Han's two paths—gradual equity-building through public housing, or a decades-long private mortgage—becomes the default reality for Kim and Max's generation alike.