[Reporter’s Notebook] How Can a Young Person Paying 700,000 Won in Rent Ever Buy a Home?

"Getting married early is the most reliable investment strategy."
I heard this from a public relations officer at a financial company when I first joined the newsroom. It was a bitter, half-joking warning that "a young worker paying monthly rent in Seoul will find it hard not only to buy a home, but even to save up a basic nest egg from wage income alone." At first, I brushed it off as a cynical joke about "marriage is reality" and "money over love." But lying in my 700,000-won-a-month studio, turning that comment over in my mind, it stopped sounding like a joke. It felt much closer to a realistic survival strategy for young people today.
For an ordinary office worker without parental help, buying a home in Seoul with wage income alone has become virtually impossible. Only by combining two people’s incomes and maxing out every possible loan can you barely inch closer to "my own home"—which in reality belongs more to the bank. The way marriage now looks like a "merger of capital" and a pact to "jointly repay debt" is a bitter self-portrait of our times.
For young people just stepping onto the starting line of asset building, the precise figures in lending regulations feel like a sharp blade. We need to ask whether the grand narrative of managing household debt is, in practice, stripping young people of even the chance to get started.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government recently used the Seoul Housing Conditions Survey to show in numbers how real estate lending regulations affect genuine end-user households without homes. Since last year’s real estate measures, the average loan amount available to young, first-time home-seeker households without property has shrunk from 255.13 million won to 192.82 million won. Given their average assets, young people now need to come up with roughly 40% more assets to buy a home. This is the result of tightening the Loan-to-Value Ratio (LTV) and raising the stress interest rate applied in the Debt Service Ratio (DSR).
In this situation, policy finance is virtually the only thing young people can lean on. That is why the conditions on policy loan products, such as the Youth Housing Dream Mortgage Loan linked to the housing subscription system, need to be eased. At present, the Youth Housing Dream Mortgage Loan can only be used for homes priced at 600 million won or less, leading to criticism that it offers little real help in Seoul and the greater Seoul area.
The threshold for borrowing remains high, while the gap with housing prices is still wide. Separate from expanding housing supply for young people and newlyweds, there needs to be a more flexible framework that improves financial access for genuine first-time homebuyers.
Because I don’t want to treat marriage as an investment strategy, I have recently developed a new habit. Before going to sleep, I scroll through a social media account with about 50,000 followers that shares information on the housing subscription system and Youth Safe Housing. Each night, I find a bittersweet kind of comfort in realizing that my desperate wish—to secure a stable place to live at a cost I can bear—is not mine alone.
chord@fnnews.com Reporter