Seoul facing a housing issue

Homebuilders have so many apartment houses to unload on the market. Yet not many families can find affordable homes in residential districts they prefer. These problems often result from the regional mismatch of supply and demand.

On the one hand, there are as many as 200,000 unsold new apartments throughout South Korea, most of them in provincial areas. As a consequence, quite a few homebuilders in those regions could collapse under the weight of a growing financial burden.

On the other hand, apartment prices remain high in Seoul. True, the prices are not as high as a couple of years ago. But they have started to go up in some areas - an unmistakable indication that even the US subprime mortgage crisis has not made much of a dent in the strong demand for homes in the capital.