Seongsu counts 140 registered homestays against seven tourist lodgings

Seongsu now has 20 registered urban homestays for every registered tourist accommodation ^[1]. Myeongdong has about 1.9, 95 homestays against 50 hotels and hostels ^[2], a count The Seoul Economic Daily attributes to hotel and hostel supply expanding as foreign tourists came back after the pandemic ^[6]. The two licences are not interchangeable. An urban homestay is rooms let out of an occupied home, and in Korea it is the category Airbnb listings fall under ^[7].

Across the same four years Seongsu's homestay register went from five to 140, 28 times the 2023 count ^[3], while Myeongdong's rose 23% ^[4]. Seongsu now carries 47% more registered homestays than the district it is being measured against ^[8].

The city has been paying for something else. Seongsu's plan eases floor area ratio and height by up to 1.2 times for projects that adopt the recommended sectors, and that list runs to 80 lines of business: 46 IT trades as primary, plus 34 supporting ones including research and development, specialised design, and video and content production ^[9][7]. Jung-gu's January revision gives Myeongdong 1.3 times for schemes that include tourist lodging, along with relief on building coverage and height ^[11]. A lodging scheme that qualifies for nothing in Seongsu therefore builds 30% more floor on the same base ratio if it moves to Myeongdong ^[6].

The 2024 rezoning shows where the effort went. Seoul took the Seongsu IT promotion district from 539,406 square metres to 2,051,234, an addition of 1,511,828 square metres covering the whole semi-industrial zone, and renamed it for IT and cultural content ^[8][5]. Choi Hwang-soo, a professor at Konkuk University's Graduate School of Real Estate, said urban plans are typically drawn with a horizon of a decade or more ^[13]. "Seongsu emerged as the kind of tourist commercial district it is now only relatively recently, so it was difficult to anticipate that and reflect it in the plan in advance," the professor said ^[14].

A licensed agent in Seongsu-dong, identified only as A, said the ground floor along Yeonmujang-gil is effectively at zero vacancy and that inquiries keep coming for space on the second floor and above ^[16]. "Most are beauty and fashion companies looking for marketing exposure. Foreign tourists have become as numerous as in Myeongdong, but there are fewer facilities such as hotels or hostels than in Myeongdong, so we are flooded with inquiries from people wanting to run lodging businesses," the agent said ^[15].

The analysis reports permit counts, not room rates or occupancy ^[19]. So the gap between demand and supply here cannot be turned into a yield, and in my view what is actually purchasable in Seongsu is 140 registrations sitting in occupied homes, one household at a time. Two things would change that. Seoul can copy Jung-gu and write lodging into the Seongsu plan, in which case a seven-unit hotel line grows quickly off a very small base ^[1]. Or the homestay count flattens the way Myeongdong's did between 94 and 95 ^[5], and the last three years were the whole window.