To disclose something up front, I’ve never bought a house before. This means that I’m actually more familiar with the Korean process of looking for homes than I am in the American system. In Korea, there are realtor offices basically every block. In the small grocery store in our apartment has at LEAST two on the first floor, and there might even be more on the second floor if we ever went up there to explore. They are everywhere. Any closet space big enough for a map of the neighborhood has a realor infesting it. Along with kimbap restaurants and mobile phone salesmen, there are so many realtors that it’s hard to believe they all have something to do.

There isn’t even very much LAND in Korea. How do they keep busy? People swap apartments much more easily than Americans swap houses. Apartment prices rise and fall on a whim here. It’s insane. Prices can fluctuate 20%+ from year to year in just this city.

When development is hot in a neighborhood, people are fiercely competitive about grabbing up and inflating the land prices. The prices of apartments also connect to politics, social expectations, education, and anything else that moves house prices in other countries. It just is accelerated here.

What do people look for in an apartment? A general rule is to treat an apartment like a bunker during a war. The closer you are to the center, the less damage you are going to recieve. Here are some of the rationale I’ve heard from different people in the past week about what makes for a good apartment:

  • The difference in price between an apartment on the first floor, and an apartment on the second floor can be 20%. An apartment on a “Royal” floor (in the middle of the apartment building) is sometimes 30% higher than the bottom floor. Everyone also avoids the top floor because of the heating costs.
  • You could buy a lower floor apartment, but never a first floor apartment, if you want to have many visitors. If too many people come to your apartment in an elevator, the people on the elevator “line” will complain you are using a disproportionate amount of electic and will demand gifts. (SERIOUSLY).
  • If you have an apartment near a road, your plants will die on your veranda. Getting somethng in the middle of the block is better because less pollution is around.
  • If you don’t buy a new apartment, you’ll almost always be expected to pay for new wall paper and floors. Also, all remodelling is done BEFORE you move in. No one remodels an apartment by themselves.
  • The difference between a 26 pyeong and a 25 pyeong apartment being livable for a couple always comes down to how intelligently it was designed. A badly designed apartment with a front approach to all apartments on a floor will lose you space in the apartment. An elevator shaft approach with 2 apartments on each side will gain you space.

Here are some tips that I’d pass on for anyone getting involved in this process (ZenKimchi, looking in your direction.)

Tips:

Despite the government’s insistence that things be measured in square meters, everyone uses pyeong, the traditional Korean measurement of area. Get to know it and use it comfortably before you go looking at ANYTHING with a realtor. Find out what your current apartment is measured in. Ask people to size things in pyeong when you go somewhere. Learn this measurement. (1 pyeong is 3.3 meters squared) (1 pyeong is 35.58 square feet for metric neophytes)

Before ever talking to a realtor, make it a habit to stop outside their offices. The words 매매 “Mae Mae” in Korean mean “Apartment for sale”. When you look at a listing, note the apartment location and block, the size, the floor, and the price. That is the rubric to which apartments are compared. The price is always listed on the sheets hanging out in front of a realtor. That is th asking price. Depending on the situation you can usually knock off a few million won from that price.

Once you narrow it down between, say, two or three apartments of the same size, in a close proximitry to where you want to live, that are roughly the same price, contact the realtor to see the apartments themselves. Then you can decide if you need to remodel before moving in, or if the design of the place is suitable.

We can arrange most viewings in little more than a few hours. We can call ahead if we need to see it at a specific time, or even drop into a realtor’s office, ask to see any of the places listed outside, and see them withing an hour. We have viewed three or more houses in under an hour. Be warned that an apartment you looked at on Monday MIGHT be closed and gone on Tuesday if someone saw it and made a better deal.

There are bank repossesion auctions online that can let you save a lot of money, but the houses that come up for bid are distributed almost by random chance, and it would be a miracle to find something that met all your criteria for finding a place that also happened to be going cheaply.

You can go to a bank and find out how much the average apartment in a complex is worth, how much the max loan a bank will give for any given apartment block, and if the apartments are tending to rise or lower in price. They update this weekly, but you only get this kind of information if you tell them you are looking at a place and need to know how much you need to get a loan. I doubt they’d tell you unless you hinted you were about to buy an apartment and wanted to know how high the asking price was from the median price of the apartments in the area.

Once you find an apartment, stike hard and fast, and push any grandmothers out of the way that might be on their way to the realtor’s office to steal your dream apartment. This is just a rough guide in my experience, but I am not dealing with any of the financial or legal headaches involved in the process. My lovely wife has all the stress, and I just come along for the ride.

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