KRIHS: "Multi-homeowner Threshold Should Change from 2 to 3 Houses, with Differentiation"

National Land Issue Report No. 79 Senior Researcher Suok Lee

To stabilize the housing market and respond to regional extinction, there has been a call to change the current multi-homeowner standard from 2 houses to 3 houses.

View of apartments in Seobu Ichon-dong from the 63 Building observatory. Photo by Hyunmin Kim kimhyun81@

On the 7th, Lee Su-wook, Senior Research Fellow at the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, said in the Land Issue Report "The Need for Transition and Tasks of Multi-Homeowner Regulation Policy" that "the transition of multi-homeowner regulation policy through adjusting the multi-homeowner standard needs to be promoted step-by-step so as not to shock the housing market."

Senior Research Fellow Lee pointed out that while multi-homeowners generally refer to owners with two or more houses, it is necessary to distinguish between multi-home residence and multi-home ownership, and that the current complex multi-homeowner regulation system based on the number of houses also needs to be reorganized or simplified.

He also explained that multi-home residence has a strong nature of consuming residential services, and since it involves residing for a certain period, such as in hometowns or rural fishing and farming villages, there is a tendency to consider up to two houses as multi-home residence target houses.

In the report, Senior Research Fellow Lee analyzed that the current system differs in calculating the number of houses and applying the multi-homeowner standard depending on the location of the houses owned by multi-homeowners, rental houses, reduced-tax houses, and whether it is a temporary two-house situation.

In fact, according to a survey conducted last year by the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements targeting the general public and experts, 48.3% of the general public responded that the multi-homeowner standard is a household owning 3 houses, which is 4.1 percentage points higher than the 44.2% who responded with 2 houses.

Experts also recognized that some complex multi-homeowner support systems with low contribution, such as exclusion of certain houses from the house count and exemption from heavy taxation, and acquisition tax and capital gains tax exemptions for houses under 100 million won, need to be abolished.

Accordingly, the report proposed adjusting the housing number standard and, considering population, owner-occupancy rate, and regional decline situations, adjusting the usual multi-homeowner standard from the existing 2 houses to 3 houses, while gradually expanding the applicable areas.

Furthermore, it argued that it is necessary to establish a multi-homeowner standard reflecting housing prices (officially assessed prices). This is to revise regulations on multi-homeowners in regions with lower-priced houses compared to owning one high-priced house, in line with tax equity.

The report also argued that to contribute to housing market stabilization and mitigation of regional extinction, houses located in the same city and county, and houses in cities and counties adjacent to metropolitan cities with populations over 500,000 should be excluded.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.