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by nmehner
1257 days ago
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Looking at demographics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea in 1955 900.000 people were born in Korea. In 2022 about 250.000. The population in 2021 only decreased by 60.000 but this number will increase rapidly. Seoul might not change for a few years but a population decrease of 1% each year will not leave the property market unaffected. |
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2021 is an outlier with excess Covid deaths and also Covid restrictions (particularly strict in Korea) massively leading people to delay marriages which also affects birth rates (again, particularly in a conservative country like Korea). If you search population projections you'll see it will likely take decades before any significant impact is had.
The latest estimate is that the population will drop by roughly 2% over the next two decades. 2% over as many as two decades, during which many black swans can and probably will happen, is clearly very little.
But even that 2% in itself will have much less of an impact than one may expect. A large portion of the elderly population (I expect this to be the majority) lives in real estate that already sees virtually zero demand from the population below 60 years old. Younger people are not going to move into those places. For all the elderly living on the countryside, their passing will have no effect on real estate prices. For most living in cities it will only have an indirect effect at best; the undesirable housing they live in will eventually be demolished, freeing up land and thereby possibly driving down housing prices, but only if new housing is actually built on them.
Elderly poverty is unfortunately a massive societal problem in Korea. A common misconception is that Korea's high suicide rate is due to the high performancs pressure placed on youth but in reality that's only a tiny part of it with elderly suicide, often driven by poverty, is overwhelmingly the main cause.