Large Apartment Complexes Lead Korea’s Housing Price Gains
Nationwide data show apartment complexes with at least 1,500 homes posted more than three times the per-unit-area price gain of developments with fewer than 300 homes over the past year.
Large apartment complexes in South Korea recorded markedly stronger price gains than smaller developments over the past year, highlighting how scale is shaping buyer preferences in the national housing market.
Average sale prices at complexes containing at least 1,500 homes reached 30.59 million won per 3.3 square meters in August, according to nationwide apartment data released by Real Estate R114. That was 2.77 million won higher than a year earlier. For a home with 84 square meters of exclusive floor space, the increase amounts to approximately 94.18 million won over the year.
The data showed a consistent relationship between the number of homes in a complex and the size of its price increase. Developments with fewer than 300 homes gained 900,000 won per 3.3 square meters. The increase was 1.09 million won for complexes with 300 to 499 homes and 1.34 million won for those with 500 to 699.
Complexes containing 700 to 999 homes posted an average gain of 1.54 million won per 3.3 square meters, while those with 1,000 to 1,499 homes rose by 1.9 million won. The 2.77 million won increase for the largest category was more than three times the gain recorded by the smallest complexes. The difference between those two groups reached 1.87 million won per 3.3 square meters.
Demand for newly built homes reflected a similar preference. Forty developments with at least 1,000 homes offered for presale nationwide this year received an average of 2,308 first-priority applications. By comparison, 135 developments with fewer than 1,000 homes attracted an average of 1,691 such applications. The average for large complexes was therefore about 36 percent higher.
The figures suggest buyers are placing a premium on the characteristics often associated with larger residential communities. Bigger complexes can support a wider range of shared amenities and services, while their greater number of transactions may make market prices easier to assess. The reported data do not establish which individual factor caused the gap, but they show that the difference appears in both existing-home prices and demand for presale units.
The widening performance divide is significant for households navigating Korea’s housing market because two apartments of similar size can follow different price paths depending on the scale of the surrounding development. It also gives developers and local planners another measure of how strongly buyers value large residential communities.