Demand, supply, capital

In Remarble's view, Seoul is an anomaly the living-sector industry has yet to price in. It is a city of nine million with an institutional rental sector that barely exists: under 0.3% of its housing stock sits in professionally managed multifamily, against 5–10% in the United States and Japan.¹ Remarble Earth, our research database, can link only 122 operating buildings across the whole city to a named living-sector operator.

For decades the gap was easy to explain. Seoul's rental market ran on jeonse: in place of rent, the tenant posts a lump-sum deposit, typically 60–80% of the property's value, which the landlord deploys as interest-free capital and returns in full when the lease ends. The stock came not from institutions but from individual "gap investors", who bought homes with a tenant's deposit covering most of the price. The structure left no role for an operator or for foreign capital. Three forces, building over a decade, are changing that.