Questioning Korean Society’s Desire for Apartments That Have Already Become Luxury Goods
Have you ever rushed to a luxury brand store after hearing news of an impending price increase and joined a long queue to make a purchase? Looking at people willing to invest their time and effort to buy handbags worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of won, doesn’t it remind you of the lottery-like frenzy at popular apartment subscription sites?
For a long time, debates surrounding Korea’s real estate market have been trapped in the same framework. Arguments for deregulating construction and increasing supply clash or align with counter-arguments for suppressing demand through financial regulations and tax policies. Thanks to policies that swing like a pendulum between these extremes, the market remains unmoved regardless of what government policies are announced. When news breaks at the end of 2025 that real estate price increases have hit record highs, we are once again consumed by frustration.
So what is the real question we should be asking?
Are Apartments Really Just Living Spaces?
According to Statistics Korea, as of 2024, 70.5% of Korean household assets are concentrated in real estate. Looking at these figures, we interpret them as “Koreans are too obsessed with real estate.” The government launches campaigns saying “a house is a place to live, not something to buy,” but for many people, this is just an empty echo. This is because for Koreans, apartments represent something special that demands everything they have.
A quick internet search reveals handbags ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of won. From photos, they don’t appear much different from luxury bags. Functionally, they might even be more convenient than famous luxury bags. Yet people don’t hesitate to rush to Hermès or Chanel stores and stand in line. Why? Because many people view luxury goods as symbols of identity that reveal their social status and class.
Could apartments be playing this same role for Koreans?
While unsold inventory piles up in some provincial cities, and cheaper alternatives like villas or detached houses exist even in Seoul, Koreans mobilize every means available to them to rush toward more expensive apartments. Just like rushing to luxury stores. Perhaps we’re not just looking for ‘a place to stay,’ but searching for something unique that everyone recognizes as having special significance.
The Irony of Standardized Desire
Unlike situations abroad, Korean apartments have a unique characteristic: an extremely standardized structure. Specific sizes called “national pyeong,” nearly identical spatial layouts, even largely uniform interiors following period-specific trends. These uniform characteristics, which make it nearly impossible to express individuality or differentiate oneself, paradoxically become the clearest and easiest means of revealing each individual’s status.
In his book The Status Game, Will Storr states that “humans constantly seek to confirm and display their social position.” Aren’t Korean apartments the most efficient mechanism for operating this status game? With just a few internet searches, anyone can find out exactly how much “an apartment of X pyeong in Y complex in Z neighborhood” costs. How the interior is decorated or what furniture was purchased doesn’t matter. Address and square footage alone determine a person’s socioeconomic status—just as carrying a specific luxury bag evaluates a person’s social standing.
It may be an uncomfortable truth, but we fully accept this system and don’t hesitate to “mobilize even our souls” to climb higher within it.
The Paradox of Supply, or the Law of Luxury Goods
The government repeatedly calls for “increased supply,” based on the simple logic that housing shortages cause price increases. But would the prices of luxury bags drop if the supply of mediocre brands—not the Hermès or Chanel that people truly want—increased tenfold?
Luxury brands create unique demand pools. Borrowing an expression from Polish writer Stanisław Lem: “The luxury industry does not merely satisfy demand. The luxury industry creates its own demand!”
That’s right. People who chase luxury goods pay no attention to other products. They focus only on the luxury goods that appeal to them. The same applies to the real estate market. Simply increasing supply numerically cannot be a solution—unless we increase the very apartments people want.
So let’s think about it: How is it possible to continuously and simultaneously mass-supply apartments when the apartments Koreans prefer exist in specific locations in specific forms that require scarcity? From this perspective, the government’s claim to control real estate prices by increasing supply remains merely an empty slogan.
The Wall That Divides Generations and Classes
Real estate issues have now become central to generational and class conflicts beyond simple economic matters. The parent generation says they secured homes through effort and savings. But to the younger generation, current apartment prices feel like numbers they could never reach even if they saved for a lifetime.
Even more serious is the integration of education and housing represented by “school district premiums.” Housing prices in areas with good schools rise even more steeply, and the economic ability to live there directly translates into the possibility of providing better educational opportunities for one’s children. Parents’ economic capital becomes children’s educational capital, which in turn reproduces as the next generation’s economic capital.
How can we break this cycle? Or do we really think we should break it?
The Frustration of Having No Housing Solutions
President Lee Jae-myung said at a town hall meeting in Chungnam on December 5, 2025: “I get a lot of criticism because of housing prices in Seoul and the metropolitan area, but looking at it, there’s no solution. The land is limited and people keep flocking in…”
That’s right. Korea’s real estate problem is so complex that even the president expresses his difficulties. Yet policymakers try to approach this complex problem only through simple market logic. After expressing his complex feelings, the president stated that balanced national development must be achieved. This too is a complex problem—no previous president has failed to implement policies for balanced national development.
Ultimately, could the reason the problem persists be that our society doesn’t want to solve the problem but rather wishes to maintain the current system?
Time to Change the Question
The reason Korean real estate policies have repeatedly failed for decades may be that we’ve been repeatedly asking the wrong questions while ignoring the truth. Before thinking about “how to increase supply and how to achieve balanced national development,” shouldn’t we genuinely ask “why are we so obsessed with apartments?”
We need to contemplate not “how to control housing prices” but “why has housing become what determines a person’s worth in our society?”
We need to reflect not on “which areas and how much to build” but “what makes us choose lives that stake everything on specific locations?”
For Koreans, apartments are not simply viewed as real estate assets. They are a giant knot intricately intertwining our society’s desires and anxieties, class structures and generational conflicts, education systems and wealth inequality. To untangle this knot, we must first accurately examine what threads are twisted and how.
Where do you live? And what does that place mean to you? Is it really a ‘home,’ or is it ‘status’? Or both?
When we can truthfully face these uncomfortable questions, we will finally find the real thread of a solution.