Seongsu's 140 homestay permits outnumber its licensed lodgings 20 to one

Seongsu's new lodging came out of houses that were already standing ^[14]. Divide its 140 registered homestays by the seven registered tourist accommodation businesses and the ratio is 20 to one ^[1][2][1]. The same division in Myeongdong, 95 homestays over 50 accommodations, gives 1.9 ^[7][8][2]. Count both classes together and the two districts hold almost the same number of registered lodging businesses, 147 in Seongsu and 145 in Myeongdong, but 95 percent of Seongsu's total is homestay against about 66 percent of Myeongdong's ^[3][4].

The Seongsu register grew 72 percent from 2024 to last year, then 73 percent again to this year ^[5]. Myeongdong's went 77, 90, 94, 95, an addition of 18 over the three years in which Seongsu added 135 ^[8][1][6]. Myeongdong's registered tourist accommodations rose from 30 in 2023 to 50 this year ^[7]. The permit data counts businesses, not rooms or nightly rates.

This year's district unit plan put the incentives behind industrial and office facilities again, easing floor-area ratio and maximum height limits by up to 1.2 times for projects that bring in the recommended sectors ^[5]. Those sectors are 46 IT categories kept as primary and 34 secondary ones, including research and development, specialised design and video and content production ^[4]. Critics quoted by the paper say the gap between tourism demand and city planning is widening because the Seongsu plan still emphasises industrial and office functions such as IT instead of tourism and lodging ^[13].

Local agents told the paper that large facilities able to take foreign tourists, hotels and hostels in particular, are scarce ^[15]. One broker said ground-floor vacancy along Yeonmujang-gil is effectively zero, with inquiries for the second floor and above coming mostly from beauty and fashion companies after marketing exposure ^[10]. "There are now as many foreign tourists as in Myeongdong, but there are fewer facilities like hotels and hostels than in Myeongdong," the broker said ^[9].

Choi Hwang-soo, a professor at Konkuk University's Graduate School of Real Estate, told the paper that urban plans are drawn with a horizon of a decade or more and that Seongsu's emergence as a tourist commercial district is recent enough to have been hard to anticipate ^[11]. "There is a need to respond to lodging demand by comprehensively considering options such as dispersing visitors to surrounding areas and making use of existing facilities," the professor said ^[12].

In my view the zoning complaint is downstream of the site economics. Seoul enlarged the Seongsu IT promotion district 3.8 times in 2024, from 539,406 square metres to 2,051,234, and renamed it for IT, cultural content and distribution ^[3]; a lodging-friendly rewrite of the incentive would still have to beat what an IT or content tenant pays for the same floorspace before a hotel gets built. Two readings would undercut that. The 140 may be gross registrations in a class that churns, in which case the standing stock is smaller than the count and the homestay answer is thinner than it looks. Or the seven accommodations that appeared since last year are the front of a hotel pipeline, and next year's register will show it.