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Foreigners owned
February 11, 2009
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| Over the last year, expatriate ownership of land in Korea surged 6.2 percent. Foreigners bought four times more in the third quarter of 2008 than in the second, the Ministry of Land said yesterday. While Koreans bought less domestic real estate in the second half of last year due to financial turbulence, expatriates bought 36.16 million square meters (14 square miles) of land and sold 23.97 million square meters. In the third quarter, expats purchased 23.24 million square meters of land, more than four times the previous quarter’s 5.1 million square meters. Expatriates in Korea owned a combined 210.35 million square meters of land here as of the end of 2008, an area 24.7 times the size of Yeouido, a district in western Seoul. Expat land holdings, which account for about 0.2 percent of all the land in Korea, are valued at 28.92 trillion won ($20.91 billion). Since Korea opened its realty market to foreigners in June 1998, expatriate land purchases grew by more than 30 percent a year through 2000. After 2002, the annual growth rate slowed to the single digits. By type, foreign corporations in partnership with Korean companies topped the list of expat land buyers last year, accounting for 47.9 percent of all land purchases. Next came ethnic Koreans with foreign citizenship who made up 46.6 percent, followed by foreign individuals at 2.9 percent and foreign corporations at 2.6 percent. Almost 31 percent of the land buyers said they wanted someplace to live, while 25.1 percent said the land was for building factories. The majority of land bought by expatriates last year was in South Jeolla. Gyeonggi and South Chungcheong were next on the list, while Gwangju and Busan saw less land purchased than in previous years. By Seo Ji-eun Staff Reporter [spring@joongang.co.kr] |
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