Lee Jun-seok urges Lee Jae Myung to scrap owner-occupancy rule to ease jeonse crunch

Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok on Monday urged President Lee Jae Myung to scrap the owner-occupancy requirement tied to the price ceiling on new apartments, calling it the most immediate fix for the country's worsening jeonse shortage.

In a Facebook post, Lee said the president "looks awfully lightweight" for "constantly offloading blame for the local elections onto his own party via social media," and asked whether stoking factional infighting was his answer to the public's verdict in those elections.

He then said there were "piles of livelihood issues that were swept under the rug during the campaign," adding that "the most dangerous and immediate signal is coming from the real estate market" — a reference to the tightening jeonse supply.

Lee took aim at President Lee's remarks at his first-anniversary press conference, in which the president described the jeonse system as a root cause of rising home prices. "If that lecture were correct, home prices should be falling as jeonse disappears," Lee said. "Instead, trying to eliminate jeonse while demand for it still exists is creating a balloon effect that pushes up home prices — people are being squeezed from both sides."

He went on to say that regardless of the feuding between pro-Lee and pro-Moon factions, "it is hard to find any difference between the two administrations when it comes to real estate." "The lease regulations are the same, and so is the arrogant approach of suppressing demand while blocking supply," he said.

Lee said the solution "is closer than you might think," arguing that the owner-occupancy requirement under the price ceiling on new apartments is "a lock the government can undo right now through legislation, without spending a single won."

He said more than 49,000 households in Greater Seoul alone are bound by that requirement. He urged the government not to forget that "when an occupancy deferral was granted, a single complex alone generated thousands of jeonse units."

"Public sentiment turns not when home prices rise, but when homes to live in disappear," Lee said. "Real estate has brought down governments regardless of their political stripe." He added that the Moon Jae-in administration had been shaken by exactly that dynamic, and the Lee Jae Myung administration was no exception. "If you do not want to become Moon Jae-in 2.0, start by lifting the owner-occupancy requirement — tens of thousands of jeonse units will hit the market immediately," he said.

지난달 서울 전세 올 들어 최대폭 올랐다…집값 상승 1위 ‘성북구’[부동산360]

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