This photo taken May 26, 2024, shows apartment complexes in Seoul. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, June 3 (Korea Bizwire) — Average South Korean workers in their 20s need 86.4 years to buy an apartment in Seoul using only their wage earnings, a report showed Monday.
Lee Han-jin, a researcher at the Labor Institute of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the largest umbrella union, released the report based on official statistics on household finance and real estate data from the KB Land application.
In 2023, the average savable income for households headed by people aged 20-29 was 13.89 million won (US$10,093), as calculated by deducing their average spending from their average yearly income of 41.23 million won.
Given the average transaction price of 1.2 billion won for an apartment in Seoul last year, a worker in their 20s would need to set aside all their savable income for 86.4 years to purchase a unit, the report said.
The figure is nearly double the 39.5 years a similar report estimated it would take to buy an apartment in the capital in 2014, a result attributable to sharp increases in home prices in recent years.
Workers in their 20s experienced an income growth rate of 21.02 percent over the 10 years, marking half the 45.17 percent growth rate recorded for workers of all age groups.
Their savable income growth rate was 12.65 percent, far lower than the 64.9 percent for workers of all age groups, the report showed, indicating that the recent home price hikes have exacerbated asset disparities between younger and older generations.
During the period of runaway home prices from 2015-2022, the net assets of households headed by people in their 20s declined to 18.08 percent of what households headed by people in their 40s had, down from 27.86 percent.
The corresponding figure for households headed by people in their 30s also fell from 72.57 percent to 63.82 percent.
(Yonhap)
