Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon called on the government to take extraordinary measures to revive the private rental market, warning that the current jump in lease prices and shortage of listings in the capital "may be only the beginning" of what he described as rental hell. While welcoming the government's review of a plan to ease comprehensive real estate tax burdens on corporate rental operators, Oh argued that existing policies, including the rollback of tax benefits for registered rental landlords, should be reconsidered in full.
Oh laid out his position in a post titled "Rental Hell Requires Extraordinary Measures" on his Facebook account on the 7th. "The rental crisis is turning all of Seoul into a housing hell," he wrote, stressing that the government "should recognize rental operators as suppliers of stable rental housing, not merely as targets of regulation." He went on to argue that lending rules should be eased and such properties excluded from the comprehensive real estate tax base so that landlords who buy existing homes can supply enough rental housing.
On the government's review of lower comprehensive real estate tax burdens for corporate rental operators, Oh said it was "fortunate that the government is at least looking into it now," while calling the move belated. "This is nowhere near enough to resolve the current rental crisis," he said, demanding additional measures to revitalize the private rental market.
He took particular issue with the tax overhaul announced last month. Seoul has about 407,000 registered private rental homes, accounting for roughly 20% of all rented housing in the city, and about 93,000 registered rental landlords. In return for accepting mandatory lease periods and caps on rent increases, they had received tax benefits, but those benefits were reduced or eliminated under the government's Aug. 3 tax overhaul.
Oh said that cutting benefits for registered rental housing to push those homes onto the sales market could backfire by shrinking rental supply. "Some units may move to the sales market, but that also means the loss of homes where tenants could live long term without worrying about rent increases or lease terminations," he said. "In the end, the damage falls on low- and middle-income households."
In Seoul, mandatory lease periods expire this year on more than 20,000 registered rental apartments, with about 30,000 units expected to reach the end of their terms by 2028. "I cannot shake the fear that the rental hell we are experiencing now may be only the beginning," Oh said.
As an alternative, he proposed creating a legal definition of a corporate private rental operator to clearly set out both support measures and obligations. Individual registered landlords should also be treated as stable suppliers of rental housing, he said, by receiving predictable benefits in exchange for meeting government-set obligations.
More fundamentally, Oh urged the government to review the owner-occupier orientation of its housing policy. "A binary approach that treats owner-occupancy as the only good will neither rein in home prices nor revive the rental market," he said. "Trust in a broken market can never be restored through policies that keep swinging back and forth."
