South Korea sees first-time buyers purchasing apartments at highest rate as mortgage regulations tighten

In South Korea, the proportion of transactions involving households buying a home for the first time in their lifetime has reached a record high among all apartment complexes and other housing units bought and sold nationwide this year.
Amid growing market uncertainty due to impeachment politics, early presidential elections, and stricter housing loan regulations, the number of first-time buyers who receive policy loan support is on the rise.
According to the court's registration information portal site, "Registration Information Square," on the 14th, the number of owners of apartment complexes (apartments, tenement houses, officetels, etc.) has increased.
An analysis of the rights transfer registration statistics revealed that of the 659,728 apartment complexes registered nationwide between January and August this year, 284,698 were first-time purchases, accounting for 43.2% of the total.
This means that more than 4.3 out of 10 apartment sales transactions were made by first-time homebuyers, up from 42.5% in the same period last year, and the number of cases involving court involvement is
This is the highest ever recorded for the period from January to August since the publication of the annual statistics in 2010. Compared to the annual statistics, the percentage of lifetime first-time transactions exceeded the previous highest figure of 43.1% in 2013, and the survey
The increase in the ratio of first-time transactions is due to generous support from low-interest policy loans for first-time home buyers, newlyweds, and households with newborns.
Another factor contributing to the increase in transactions is that, unlike households that own more than one home, these households are not subject to home equity loan restrictions from commercial banks.
Financial authorities have restricted mortgage lending to homeowners this year, as they did last year, in an effort to control household debt.
The impact of interest rate hikes and jeonse (Korean housing rental system) fraud has also led to a decline in investment demand for tenements, multi-family housing, and officetels.
Some analysts say that this has boosted the number of first-time buyers in Seoul. The percentage of first-time buyers in Seoul from January to August this year was approximately 38%, down from 38.8% in the same period in 2014 (30.7% for the year).
In terms of the number of transactions, the number of first-time apartment ownership transfer registrations during this period was 284,698, the highest level in 11 years since 2021, when housing prices reached their peak.
This is the second highest number of registrations in the past four years, second only to 2019 (361,750), and the second highest number of registrations nationwide since 2021 (1,040,459).