‘Housing Lottery’ to End After 37 Years

The popular Korean lottery game “Housing Lottery” will disappear after 37 years.

The reason why Housing Lottery is disappearing is because there are too many different lottery games that, with the exception of Lotto, are not showing healthy revenues.

The Prime Minister’s Office Lottery Committee explained, “After the advent of Lotto, out of 3.45 trillion won lottery tickets sold, 3.28 trillion won, or 95 percent, were from Lotto sales. The rest saw their sales shrink, and with fixed printing and sales costs, our high-cost low-efficient structure worsened, making restructuring necessary.”

Currently the committee plans to halt the sales of 13 printed lottery tickets, including Housing Lottery, until March, and combine and sell them in five new types of lottery games: two that are drawn, and three that are instant.

The Housing Lottery, which was first printed in accordance with the Korean Housing Bank Law, legislated in September of 1969, was the first Korean regular lottery. The lottery sold in order to collect housing construction funds for families of soldiers and police, national meritorious persons, and veterans returning from Vietnam, and cost 100 won at the time. The prize money for first place was three million won, and 500,000 tickets were sold every month.

In the early 1950s, a house in Seoul cost about one million won, so for ordinary people, the game was a ticket to their dreams of owning their own house.

Initially, it was sold monthly in the Seoul area, but staring in June 1972 it started to be sold three times a month, and in 1973 it began to be sold weekly. The jackpot also increased to 10 million won in 1978, 30 million won in 1981 and upwards until it reached 100 million won in 1983.

The stories of the winners of Housing Lottery also became hot issues. While most Koreans were all focused on the new Lotto game, in 2004, the 35 year-old Housing Lottery handed out the richest lottery prize ever: a one billion won winner. The winner won first place, 500 million won, two second place tickets worth 250 million, and two 10 million won fifth-place tickets, giving him 10.2 billion won, which became 780 million won after taxes.

Chin-Ku Lee sys1201@donga.com