Promoting Regulation of Apartment Sale Prices

The government is considering policies to regulate the sale prices of apartments in public housing land such as Pangyo, a new city.

According to the Ministry of Finance and Economy and the Ministry of Construction and Transportation on October 17, the Ministry of Construction and Transportation will report to the Ministry of Finance and Economy the “Housing Market Stabilization Policy List” including the information above. Related to this, it was confirmed that the Ministry of Construction and Transportation had discussed controlling the sale prices at the “Real Estate Policy-related Meeting” under the lead of Choi Jae-duk, Vice Minister, with the participation of People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and Citizen’s Coalition for Economic Justice.

Kim Nam-geun, Cooperation Affairs Director of the Coalition who attended the meeting, said, “After the policy of price self-regulation took effect, the construction companies raised their sale price making it more expensive than the market price, which caused the price increase for the existing housing. The companies keep repeating this cycle, creating an increasingly worse feedback every time. We have requested for a policy to partly regulate the sale price.”

Regarding this, Jung Chang-soo, Housing Director at the Ministry of Construction and Transportation, said, “We are considering all the possible policies including regulating the sale price.”

Meanwhile, Kim Jin-pyo, Minster of Finance and Economy and Deputy Prime Minister, said at a press conference after the Economy Minister Meeting on October 17, “We are collecting the policy suggestions from all the related ministries and offices and will announce the final policy later this month.” Kim added, “We are opening the policies of housing selling, finance, taxation, and education to public and will decide on the order of priority among them.” He also added that the “Policy Advance Notice System” would be adopted to shows all the possible policies and readjustments on the effective dates of the policies according to the market condition.

The Ministry of Finance and Economy will categorize the policies according to their intensity from short-term, mid-term, and to long-term ones and announce the final policy around October 29 based on the suggestions made by the Ministry of Construction, Transportation, the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development and other related ministries and offices. The policies being discussed so far include: Housing Deal Permit System, Decreasing Housing Mortgage Loan Percentage, Increasing Holding Tax, and Education Policy.