There’s a Korean word you should know: youngkkeul (영끌). It literally means “scraping together your soul.” It’s not some spiritual thing — it describes what people do to buy a home here. You gather every won you can, borrow every loan you qualify for, and put your soul up as collateral too. The joke stopped being funny a while ago — because the plain truth is that most young Koreans can’t buy a home anymore, at least not the normal way.
I’ve been watching this same movie for about ten years. When I got married, the prices already felt insane. “This is crazy. Nobody should pay this. It’ll come down.” Then a year passed, and that “crazy” price turned out to be the floor. Another year, and that was the floor too. Every single year, someone said this is the last bus out of here — and every single year, they were right. By the next year, the bus had already left, and it was more expensive than before.
Eventually I bought in too, at a price I’d once called insane. I won an apartment through Korea’s cheongyak (청약, the new-build subscription lottery), and even then people warned me I’d regret paying that much. But in the year or two since, construction material costs and labor costs climbed so fast that the price I paid is now considered cheap — they say you couldn’t get a comparable unit at that price anymore. So I caught the last bus again.
Except here’s the thing I’ve learned: there is no last bus. The bus leaves every year. The one I caught wasn’t the final one — it was just that year’s last bus. Next year someone else will climb onto an even pricier one, swearing it’s truly the last.
The numbers, for people outside Korea
Here’s Korea’s housing situation in one sentence: to buy an average home in Seoul, an average earner would have to save their entire salary — spending nothing on food, rent, or anything else — for about 14 years.
That’s the PIR (price-to-income ratio): roughly 13.9 years for Seoul. Nationwide it’s 6.3, but Seoul is nearly double that. And “save your whole salary for 14 years” is obviously impossible for a real human being who needs to eat.
So today, about 73% of Koreans under 40 don’t own a home. Ten years ago it was around 66%. Over that same stretch, the homeownership rate for people in their 40s and 50s actually went up. Translation: the generation above bought in and protected their wealth, while the generation below keeps getting pushed further out of the market.
If you can’t buy, you rent — and even that has shifted hard. Korea has a unique system called jeonse (전세, a lump-sum deposit lease), where instead of paying monthly rent, you hand the landlord a huge deposit and live (sort of) rent-free. (I wrote a whole separate piece on how jeonse works, if you’re curious.) But jeonse is vanishing fast. More than 60% of lease contracts are now monthly rent, and for Seoul apartments that figure has climbed to about 64%. The average monthly rent for a Seoul apartment hit 1.46 million KRW (around $960) — the highest on record. Young renters here spend roughly a third of their income just on housing.
How it got this bad
It’s not one cause, but three things happened at once.
First, home prices outran incomes — badly. In a good year, my salary goes up by a few thousand dollars. Home prices can go up by tens of thousands of dollars in a year — sometimes well over a hundred thousand. You cannot close that gap by saving harder. This is exactly why “this is the last bus” repeats every year: the bus really does leave, and the next one really is more expensive.
Second, jeonse collapsed, and the safe middle rung disappeared. The old ladder went: live in jeonse for a few years, save up, then buy. But jeonse supply shrank, and after a wave of deposit-fraud scandals, a new word entered the language — jeonsephobia (전세포비아), the fear of signing a jeonse contract at all. As people fled to monthly rent, their money started disappearing every month instead of sitting in a deposit they’d get back. Less room to save, not more.
Third, supply is tight. Not many new units are coming online, and with material and labor costs up, building a new apartment is simply more expensive now. So new-build prices keep rising — which is exactly how the price I paid became “the old price” so quickly.
So why is everyone obsessed with buying?
Here’s where an outsider might reasonably ask: “If prices are that insane, why not just not buy, and live well on your salary instead?”
This is the part that surprises people. Korean salaries aren’t low — not once you take housing out of the equation. Someone who already owns a home, or got help from their parents to settle the housing question, can just spend what they earn on living. And they live pretty well: eating out, traveling, sending kids to academies, even saving. Korean income levels make that perfectly doable.
The problem is that one single thing: the home. The moment you buy — especially if you youngkkeul your way in — a big chunk of that comfortable income gets vacuumed up by principal and interest. And if you never buy, monthly rent vacuums up that same space instead. Either way, this one variable decides your entire financial life.
That’s why a home in Korea isn’t just a place to live. It’s closer to a pass/fail gate for your whole adult life. The gap between people who own and people who don’t isn’t really about how much they earn — it’s about whether they got through that gate. That’s why people scramble to buy at absurd prices. Not because their income is too small, but because they know that solving the housing question changes everything else downstream.
What young Koreans actually do about it
Let me be clear about one thing: young Koreans have not given up on buying. If anything, they chase it harder. They just can’t do it the straightforward way, so they find other routes.
1) Youngkkeul. Without help from parents, buying basically means buying with debt. Once you youngkkeul in, a huge share of your monthly income goes to principal and interest. Honestly, that’ll be me too once I move in. But here’s the brutal part: almost everyone who did youngkkeul into a home has come out ahead. Meanwhile the cautious ones — the people who said “it’ll drop” and stayed in jeonse — got hammered, because jeonse prices climbed nearly as fast as sale prices. The careful people lost. That outcome makes everyone else even more frantic.
2) Cheongyak. This is why so many young people pour their hopes into the new-build subscription lottery. The appeal is structural: if you win, you only pay 10% as a down payment upfront, and you have the years until move-in to come up with the rest. You buy time even if you don’t have the full amount today. (You’ll still need a big loan at move-in, of course.) That’s why cheongyak is treated like an actual lottery ticket.
3) Crypto and stocks. If your salary will never catch the market, some people try to grow a seed instead — putting their would-be home fund into crypto or equities and hoping it compounds into a down payment. Some make it. Some fall further behind. Either way, the goal at the end of the road is the same: a home.
The honest part
I didn’t win my apartment because I was clever. I just got in line a little earlier. And that line never ends. There are people queued up behind me, and a more expensive bus is waiting for them.
People in their 20s and 30s right now have it much harder than I did. Material and labor costs are higher, supply is tighter, and the odds of a salary ever catching home prices keep shrinking. The one thing I’m certain of, year after year, is that I can see prices rising every single year. As long as that’s visible, it’s hard to tell the next generation “just save a little more.”
And this isn’t only a real estate story. There’s a reason Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. When it feels impossible to marry without a home, and impossible to raise a child while paying off one, people delay or skip marriage and kids. Here’s the strange part, though: even while postponing marriage and children, almost no one gives up the goal of owning a home. They’ll defer the wedding and the baby — but they’ll keep chasing the apartment. That’s how absolute a goal it is here.
A last thought
From the outside, Korea looks like Samsung, K-pop, and a glittering Seoul skyline. What’s harder to see is how far out of reach “one room of my own” has drifted for an ordinary person inside that skyline. And the flip side, which is just as true: once that one thing is solved, life in Korea is actually pretty good.
So young Koreans don’t quit. They keep lining up in front of those insane prices, watching the bus leave every year, trying to climb onto the next one. How is it where you live — do younger people still believe they’ll own a home someday? Tell me in the comments.
(This post reflects my personal experience and observations, not investment advice.)
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