Government Posts Benchmark Housing Prices, Takes Criticism from Public

The government has promoted a “posted-price system” targeting around 13 million households across the nation, in order to improve the fairness of the imposition of taxes, but the system has drawn harsh criticism because of insufficient preparation.

The Ministry of Construction and Transportation and 31 local governments announced Wednesday that many people complained about the system since the government’s posted prices of houses were either too high or much lower than real prices. Such criticism has come out owing to the lack of the credibility of the posted prices since the assessment was completed in just three months.

On April 4, a group of residents who live in areas designated as places for redevelopment visited the taxation office in Busanjin-gu, Busan and complained, “The posted prices are less than half of the real prices.”

In Buk-gu, Gwangju, many residents protested, claming that the government should correct the posted prices of houses.

Kim, from Bangbae-dong, Seocho-gu in Seoul, said, “My house price is over 600 million won, but its posted price is 300 million won,” adding, “Something is clearly wrong.”

In contrast, some people were resentful because the posted prices of their homes were determined to be higher than their real prices.

At the ward office of Seo-gu in Daegu on April 4, three people complained that housing prices were estimated to be higher than their original prices. The district office of Bupyeong-gu in In-cheon also received petitions asking to lower the posted prices.

The service for providing the information about benchmark housing prices also is not working properly owing to short preparation. Most local government offices, excluding Gangnam-gu and Seocho-gu in Seoul, do not have a separate center for offering such information. Therefore, citizens can only get the data by making phone calls or visiting a local office by themselves, which is igniting the anger of the public.

Homemaker Wu Hyun-suk, living in Icheon-city, Gyeonggi, said, “It was very disappointing to notice the fact that even government workers did not know that posted-prices of houses are available for public view when I called the office to get the information.”

The reason, why the number of complaints has continued to grow at a time when not so many people are seeking information on posted-prices, is believed to be mainly because of the tight schedule for the system and a lack of readiness.

An official in the district office of Busanjin-gu said, “Exact research was impossible in the first place since there has been only one civil servant who is in charge of the project. That person has had to deal with 7,000 cases for the past three months.”

A relevant official from Incheon city confessed, “There might be errors in the system, since civil workers were in hurry while inputting evaluated housing prices.”

In addition, some point out that the low number of sample houses used to determine the posted prices of individual houses and apartments, which is only three percent of the total number of households, or 135,000 houses out of 4.5 million, is a problem.