Koreans Complaining about Foreigners' Growing Land Ownership
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and Statistics Korea announced on Nov. 16 that land owned by foreigners increased from 71,575 lots (190,550,794 square meters) to 147,483 lots (248,666,253 square meters) from 2011 to 2019 and the official price of the land rose from 24,995.7 billion won to 30,775.8 billion won in that period.
Especially, that owned by Chinese showed a substantial increase from 3,515 lots (3,695,166 square meters, 765.2 billion won) to 50,559 lots (19,302,784 square meters, 2,580.4 billion won). Their ratio to all foreign landowners increased a lot, too. Specifically, the ratio jumped from 4.91 percent to 34.28 percent on a lot basis, from 1.93 percent to 7.76 percent on an area basis, and from 3.06 percent to 8.38 percent on a price basis.
More and more South Koreans are complaining about the increasing land ownership of foreigners. “No South Korean can own land in China and laws have to be made right away so that Chinese’ speculative real estate investments in South Korea can be blocked,” a citizen said.
The National Tax Service also announced on Nov. 16 that foreigners bought 23,167 apartments in South Korea from 2017 to May this year and the total value of such transactions jumped from 1,789.9 billion won to 2,397.6 billion won from 2017 to last year. In this period, a total of 23,219 foreigners bought apartments in South Korea, including 13,573 Chinese.