Increasing Transparency of Official Prices... Establishing 'Official Price Verification Centers' in Local Governments

Separation of Review Authorities for Objection to Officially Announced Prices
Gradual Disclosure of Apartment Floor, Direction, and View Ratings
Plan to Increase Workforce for Official Price Assessment

The government has decided to establish 'Official Price Verification Centers' in local governments to enhance the accuracy and transparency of real estate official prices. For apartments where official prices vary depending on direction or floor, a grading system by category will be prepared, and grades by floor and direction will be prioritized for disclosure in the first half of next year.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

On the 15th, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport announced that the 'Real Estate Official Price System Improvement Plan,' which includes these details, was deliberated and approved at the Central Real Estate Price Public Announcement Committee meeting held on the 13th. Official prices are used as basic data for 67 administrative systems such as health insurance premiums, land compensation, and charges. However, the calculation process has not been transparently disclosed until now, leading to criticisms regarding the accuracy and reliability of official prices. Accordingly, the Yoon Seok-yeol administration is promoting improvements to the official price system as a national agenda.

The government will first establish 'Official Price Verification Centers' in metropolitan local governments to verify the entire process of real estate official price calculation conducted by the government. Currently, the Korea Real Estate Board investigates and calculates housing official prices and also performs verification tasks, effectively operating a self-verification system. The government has granted the local government official price verification centers the authority to conduct the first review of objections and separated the procedure so that the Central Real Estate Price Public Announcement Committee deliberates on them. Within this year, the government plans to design a system for operating the official price verification center in collaboration with Seoul City and will pilot the project in 2 to 3 cities/provinces next year.

Additionally, starting next year, grades will be assigned to price-determining factors such as apartment floor, direction, and view, and disclosed step-by-step. Apartment prices vary depending on floor, direction, and view, but until now, there were no specific standards for calculating these. As a result, official prices for certain complexes were sometimes set identically regardless of floor. Therefore, the government will establish a grading system for price-determining factors such as floor, direction, and view, and will first disclose grades for floors (up to 7 grades) and directions (8 directions), which are of high public interest and relatively easy to grade, in the first half of next year. For items subject to surveyor subjectivity, such as view (city, forest, river, others) and noise (strong, medium, weak), guidelines will be prepared, and grade disclosure will be promoted by 2026.

To encourage responsible price calculation, a 'Real Name System for Official Prices' will be introduced, disclosing the surveyor's real name and contact information when viewing official prices of multi-family housing. When real estate owners file objections, more specific calculation grounds, including market price-related information, will be provided.

From this year, the workforce for calculating official prices of multi-family housing will also be increased. The number of personnel, which was 520 last year, will be increased by 25% to 650 this year and expanded by 33% to 690 by 2025.

The introduction of an automated system for official price calculation will also be considered. Whether to apply an Automated Valuation Model (AVM), a program that automatically calculates real estate prices such as actual transaction prices, to official price calculation will also be reviewed.

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