Lee keeps Seoul's loan and tax curbs into the 84th week of rising apartment prices

Compound August's jeonse and monthly rent prints for twelve months and they come to roughly 12.2% and 12.4% ^[3][16]. One month is not a year. The sales index for the same city, though, has risen in every week since the first week of February 2025, which is 84 weeks, a little over nineteen months without a down print ^[1][17].

The curbs in place are loan restrictions and heavier tax burdens on expensive homes, and the Seoul Economic Daily editorial argues that neither makes the demand to live in Seoul disappear ^[7][21]. Its evidence is the flattening: prices in Seocho and Gangnam falling while prices outside Gangnam rise, which the paper attributes largely to demand moving to avoid the regulations ^[8]. At his news conference last week President Lee Jae-myung said he would maintain the existing approach. On the paper's account he identified the "single-pole concentration in the capital region" as the fundamental obstacle to stabilizing home prices there, and the solution he presented was "balanced national development that diversifies the hubs of growth and development" ^[4][5][6].

Dispersion has to land somewhere. The National Data Office projects population declining in 16 metropolitan cities and provinces, Sejong excepted, from 2039. By 2052 it has the working-age population in eight of them, half that list, shrinking by more than 40% from 2022 levels ^[10][11][18]. Sedaily writes that the policy debate still opens with how many public agencies to move out of Seoul. The cost of a community outside the capital equipped with housing, education, health care, culture and transport stays far less concrete ^[13]. Successive governments have set balanced development as a goal, and concentration in the capital region has rarely slowed ^[19].

In my view the tradeable content here is rotation. The bid moves from Gangnam to the rest of Seoul ^[8], and from ownership into jeonse and monthly rent, where the paper says supply is already contracting under demand-management policies centered on owner-occupancy ^[9]. The other reading has real support. Seocho and Gangnam prices are falling now ^[8], and a long enough run of credit restriction can end an 84-week streak outright instead of redistributing it ^[1].

The next prints separate the two readings. If the districts outside Gangnam stop rising and the jeonse and rent indices decelerate from August's near-1% monthly pace, the curbs have cut the level of demand ^[3][8]. If rents keep printing close to 1% a month while the sales index goes flat, the bid moved into the rental market, where the households that Sedaily says are already insecure do the paying ^[9].