A Complete Analysis of the Seoul Apartment Market: From Location to Leading Complexes by Area

Recently, a 25-pyeong panoramic Han River view unit at Raemian One Bailey in Banpo-dong reportedly traded at 3.83 billion won. On a supply-area basis, the price per pyeong is not far from 200 million won.

When financial gurus and real estate lecturers were saying in 2021—when home prices were rising indiscriminately—that everything from Seoul’s prime districts to the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province was good with no real differentiation, I consistently said the following.

That was my recommendation, and if you didn’t have that level of capacity, I said you shouldn’t be investing in apartments at all. In reality, rather than putting money into so-so properties, investing in the S&P 500 index would have been far better, especially considering the depreciation of the won. As I had forecast, Banpo has now secured its status as the very top-tier location in Korea, surpassing Apgujeong, and it is setting transcendent price records both in absolute terms and in growth rates.

Novices offer the plausible excuse that only Banpo went up because Jamsil-dong, Samseong-dong, Daechi-dong, and Cheongdam-dong were designated land transaction permit zones starting June 2020. But even Seocho-dong and Bangbae-dong, which are in the same Seocho-gu, have completely failed to keep pace with Banpo’s prices despite new apartment supply. And outside of Gangnam plus the Han River–side areas of Seongdong/Yongsan/Mapo, there are countless places that still haven’t broken their previous peaks even in won terms. I judge that polarization is highly likely to worsen going forward, and that the era of building wealth simply by trading up has passed. Instead of donating lecture fees to dubious gurus and tagging along on other people’s apartment site tours, people should first be thinking about how to earn more from their day jobs.

Even so, real estate—especially Seoul apartments—is an asset that everyone in Korea cares about, and there is far too much fanciful or simply wrong analysis out there. That is why AWARE is undertaking an in-depth interpretation based on ten years of actual transaction data through November from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

In June 2022, in an article I contributed at the request of Eollukso titled “Outlook for the Korean Real Estate Market in an Era of Monetary Tightening,” I concluded as follows.

After the Moon Jae-in administration took office in 2017, apartment prices nationwide kept setting new record highs, but starting in 2022, triggered by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s rapid hikes in its policy rate, they fell about 20–30% from the peak. Those who had taken on excessive leverage in a zero-interest-rate era they thought would last forever suddenly found there was no one left to take the properties they were forced to dump.

I believe Korea’s tax regime on real estate, which heavily penalizes multi-homeowners, played a major role in both the surge of 2020–2021 and the sharp drop at the end of 2022. For markets to function, you need players who move for short-term profit to act as “liquidity providers”: when prices plunge and fall below intrinsic value, they step in to absorb the selling, and when prices spike, they sell to realize gains. But virtually every housing-related tax—property tax, capital gains tax, and so on—treats the very existence and trading activity of multi-homeowners as something “harmful,” effectively removing the actors who could respond to abrupt market shifts.

Then, in 2023, even as sale prices were falling sharply, it became clear that there was no fundamental problem in the Seoul apartment market in terms of rent demand and rent growth. Demand began to increase from people looking either to buy their first home or to trade up to a better area, and major complexes located in Seoul’s most favored districts—often called landmark apartments—managed to recover trading volumes and rebound to near or above their previous peaks. The problem is that apartments in areas people like less did not see the same recovery. In the end, higher interest rates have deepened polarization. When resources are scarce, people naturally gravitate only to “sure bets.”

The table above summarizes the top 30 legal dongs in terms of price per pyeong, based on exclusive-use area, for standard apartments traded in 2024. Legal dongs highlighted in yellow are land transaction permit zones.

Within the top 20, Gangnam-gu dominates with eight dongs, followed by Seocho-gu with four and Songpa-gu with three; together, the so-called three Gangnam districts account for 75%. Seeing Gaepo-dong far surpass Yeoksam-dong, you might think it would be better to adjust for the share of transactions in new-build apartments constructed after 2015. But there is also the view that new builds are themselves a proxy for location quality, so I’ll leave that to your own judgment.

North of the river, Seongdong-gu, Jongno-gu, Mapo-gu, and Yongsan-gu make the list. But if you dig into the data, you’ll see that in Seongsu-dong 1-ga, all the transactions reflected are for Trimage, which can’t really be called a standard apartment, revealing a gap in the filtering. For reference, Yeouido-dong—excluded because it had only two transactions this year—would have ranked first ahead of Banpo-dong before exclusion, thanks to Brighton Yeouido.

The filtering criteria for “standard apartment transactions” are as follows:

Because today’s punitive policies that suppress multiple-home owners are still in place, and will likely remain so, I focused on reflecting the type of “owner-occupier demand” that people generally prefer. Since the market is being driven only by end-users, old apartments undergoing reconstruction or remodeling are closer to investment demand than to actual residential demand, and the older the building, the greater the variance in floor area ratio, which tends to distort the price per pyeong of net floor area. I also excluded direct transactions, which are mostly special deals among relatives, and first-floor transactions, because they do not reflect the average listing prices in a given complex.

You can see that most of the top 30 legal dong areas are concentrated in districts widely known to be popular: the three Gangnam districts, plus Mapo, Seongdong, Jongno, and Yongsan. Compared with the 2016 data, rankings in Gangnam areas such as Jamwon-dong, Gaepo-dong/Irwon-dong, and Garak-dong have risen, while rankings in northern Seoul have generally fallen, except for Seongsu-dong 1-ga. Seongsu-dong 1-ga isn’t really a fair comparison, as it’s dominated by Trimage.

The reason Gangnam is rising while northern Seoul is falling comes down to timing differences in reconstruction and redevelopment projects. Large-scale reconstruction and redevelopment in northern Seoul (for example, Mapo Raemian Prugio and Bukahyeon-dong Sinchon E-Pyunhansesang) were mostly concentrated in the mid-2010s, whereas Gangnam’s large-scale reconstruction projects were concentrated in the mid-to-late 2010s and into the 2020s. Garak-dong’s ranking, in particular, has jumped sharply, likely as a result of Helio City’s more than 9,000 new units coming on the market in 2018. Large new-apartment supply clearly has a very positive impact on the area’s price per pyeong, which is only natural, since it improves local living conditions. Economists who only ever draw supply-and-demand curves on a blackboard might find this puzzling.

You can also see that transaction volumes in Daechi-dong and Cheongdam-dong, which are designated land transaction permit zones, are very low. That’s because there aren’t many apartments in those areas that were built after 2004. The large complexes in Daechi-dong—Eunma, Woosung, Seonkyung, and Mido—are all slated for reconstruction. Cheongdam-dong is a bit different: its only real large complex, Samik Apartments, is currently being rebuilt, and most of the rest are small complexes built in the 1990s and early 2000s. In land transaction permit zones, buyers are required to live in the property for two years, so there’s actually no particular reason to filter for post-2004 buildings. I’ll discuss these areas in more detail in the section on each neighborhood’s flagship apartment.

It’s also worth noting that Banpo-dong, which has the highest price per pyeong in Seoul, still shows a fairly large number of transactions. This is an area where 30-pyeong units easily exceed 3 billion won, making it very hard to access, yet even here, liquidity is strong. Real estate is generally known to be an illiquid asset, but apartments in Seoul with strong living conditions are easy to liquidate and command a liquidity premium. Some people insist that the “truly rich” live in 100-pyeong units like Nine One Hannam, but those are apartments only in the legal sense; I don’t think they’re appropriate comparables to what we typically think of as standard apartments.

That’s why each area’s “landmark apartment” or “flagship apartment” matters. Even in Gangnam, the rental ratio at major large complexes in Seoul is around 60 percent. In other words, these properties have to satisfy both owner-occupier and investor demand.

This time, I calculated each area’s price per pyeong based on all apartment transactions (excluding only first-floor and direct transactions), and then classified the most-traded apartment in each area this year as that area’s flagship. To reflect both owner-occupier and investor demand, I excluded apartments built before 2004 and those with fewer than five transactions this year.

Compared with the data limited to standard apartments, the area rankings don’t change much. The three Gangnam districts still account for a large share, and among them, Gangnam-gu is overwhelmingly dominant. Overall, you can see a tendency for the area’s price per pyeong to come down. The fact that area-wide prices per pyeong calculated using only standard apartments that reflect both owner-occupier and investor demand are higher tells you that people are willing to pay a valuation premium for properties that “check all the boxes.”

The story looks a bit different in land transaction permit zones. Because buyers there are required to live in the property for two years, you have to assume they are weighing both residential and investment value regardless of the property’s specific features. Here, only Jamsil-dong’s price per pyeong rises slightly compared with the earlier calculation, while Samsung-dong, Daechi-dong, and Cheongdam-dong fall in line with the broader trend. This reflects a mix of different factors, but we can draw the following inferences.

For this analysis, I used the latest “Seoul real estate actual transaction information” data provided on the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport website. To overcome the limitations posed by the sheer size of the dataset, I ran SQL queries through a DuckDB-based client optimized for data analysis instead of using Excel. The following is the query I used to identify each area’s flagship apartment.

You can download the completed Excel summary comparing all legal dong areas after logging in to AWARE at the link below.