Over 50 Percent of Landowners of Planned New Capital Are Outsiders

Over half of the landowners of the so planned new capital site--the land around South Chungcheong province Dong-myun, Nam-myun, Kumnam-myun in Yeongi-gun and Jangi-myun in Gongju --are non-Chungcheong residents.

In addition, about 35 percent of all speculative real estate deals completed in the area of Daejeon and Chungcheong Province in the early half of this year involved non-Chungcheong residents living in places such as the Seoul metropolitan area.

The NTS (National Tax Service) is conducting high intensity tax investigations since May and is planning to collect evaded taxes from 174 people suspected of real estate speculation in the area around Jochiwon, Yeongi, and Gongju.

According to the Yeongi-gun county office on July 7, out of the 13,500 landowners who own land in Dong-myun, Nam-myun, Kumnam-myun (the three myun where the new capital is planned to be relocated) and are subject to aggregate land taxes, 7,515 landowners, or 55.6 percent, are outsiders living in the Seoul, Gyeonggi, Inchon area or Daejeon among other regions. This is about 10 percent higher than the average percentage of outside landowners in the whole Yeongi-gun area, which is 45.5 percent.

One real estate agent in Gongju Jangi-myun said, “Jangi-myun has been mentioned as the place for the new capital since a long time ago, so there are more outside landowners here than in Yeongi-gun,” adding, “The amount of land bought by outsiders is so big that it is fine to estimate that over 70 percent of the land belongs to outsiders.”

On the other hand, it has been confirmed that aside from the ongoing tax audits on 554 real estate speculation suspects in the Chungcheong region by the Seoul NTS, the Daejeon NTS will conduct a new investigation on their own as well as strengthening supervision of real estate after monitoring real estate transactions.

In a telephone interview with Donga, Kim Jae-chun, director of the Daejeon NTS Investigation Division II, explained, “[Among subjects of the investigations] There are suspects of tax evasion after selling real estate, as well as real estate buyers that have no income such as minors and housewives,” adding, “we plan to collect about 10 billion won worth of taxes during this month.”

While going over real estate transactions suspected of speculation dating from this year’s January until May in order to select subjects for tax audits, the Daejeon NTS found out that outsiders from Seoul, Kyeongi, Inchon and other areas made up 35 percent of such transactions.

According to the NSO (National Statistical Office), the net population inflow (subtracting population outflow from population inflow) of Yeongi-gun during May was 1,306, or 26 times of that during April (49 incoming people).

In particular, people coming from other areas outside South Chungcheong into Yeongi-gun numbered 1,765, which is 2.5 times April’s number of 655.

It is assumed that a large proportion of the people coming to Yeongi-gun are doing so just to buy land or apartments. The net population inflow into Gongju, which is also being developed side-by-side with Yeongi-gun, during May was 179, which is a significant increase from April’s net population inflow of -213.

As for South Chungcheong’s Cheonan and Nonsan, which received lower scores than the Yeongi-Gongju area during the evaluation for the new capital’s location, the net population inflows was 2,878 and 568, respectively, which were lower than the previous month’s figures.