Lee Vows All-Out Housing Supply Push, Even Revising Laws to Secure Land

President Lee Jae-myung on the 13th called real estate "a core problem for South Korea," saying that "supply policy in particular has become the issue." He stressed that the country faces "a supply cliff since 2022" and must "launch an all-out, wide-ranging supply campaign with special resolve."

Speaking at a meeting with senior secretaries held at the presidential office, Lee said that "social resources have been excessively concentrated in real estate for a long time, deepening polarization and inequality," adding that "the real estate bubble has also reached a level that can no longer be left unchecked."

Lee repeatedly emphasized the supply problem. Marking 2022 as a turning point, he said that "permits were sharply reduced and housing starts fell heavily, inevitably producing a kind of supply cliff," and that "extraordinary efforts are needed to fill it." He added that "supply policy also faces many real-world constraints," and that "we must shorten the various permit and approval procedures as much as possible, and secure building land boldly — not bound by existing regulations, and revising laws and systems if necessary — to move ahead on supply."

While stressing "bold and swift supply," Lee also called for combining tax and financial measures, saying that "an organic combination of a fair and reasonable tax system and a detailed, robust financial policy is essential above all."

He also pushed back against criticism that the process of gathering public opinion amounts to "patchwork policy" or "flip-flopping." "Even after a policy is announced, we must faithfully reflect the public's views to further raise the completeness of the policy," he said. He continued that "because changing a policy after it is announced gets judged as a lack of consistency or as flip-flopping, people tend not to change it," and that "this is an outdated way of the past."

Lee added that "public officials and civil servants cannot be 100% perfect beings," and that the goal is "to do our best to draft policy proposals, but present them to the public and the political sphere, and when various good suggestions or amendments are put forward, to review them reasonably, discuss them transparently, gather them and build better, more complete policy."