Korea's first real estate developer research institute makes its debut

The Korea Real Estate Development Industry Institute (KREDII), launched by the Korea Developer Association through an expansion of its policy research division, made its official debut Thursday. As the first dedicated research institute in the real estate development sector, KREDII plans to break down barriers between development, construction and finance, and actively explore ways to build cross-industry solidarity.

The Korea Developer Association and KREDII held a symposium Thursday at Oakwood Premier COEX Center in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, under the theme "The Era of Great Transformation: Roles and Strategies of the Real Estate Development, Construction and Finance Industries."

The event opened with remarks by KREDII President Kim Seung-bae. "We will conduct research that the public and the government can trust, grounded in objective data, and become an advanced research hub that translates findings into the language of policy," Kim said.

KREDII Honorary Chairman Moon Joo-hyun and Korea Developer Association President Kim Han-mo also offered welcoming remarks, saying KREDII "will identify the industrial and lifestyle infrastructure needs and institutional reform tasks required in the AI era, connect on-the-ground concerns to policy alternatives, and proactively chart the direction for the real estate development industry."

The symposium featured academic assessments spanning the broader spatial industries, including real estate development, construction and real estate finance. KREDII research fellow Lee Jin said demand for data centers would "surge 3.5-fold by 2030 driven by the spread of AI," adding that the industry should pay close attention to the supply of new industrial infrastructure such as data centers and renewable energy complexes. Lee also called for a shift away from new land development toward improving the performance of existing urban areas — through downtown renewal, regeneration and mixed-use redevelopment — and said "developers must evolve into data-driven, future-demand-oriented planners and risk managers."

Heo Yun-gyeong, a research fellow at the Korea Construction Industry Institute, pointed to the domestic construction market's heavy dependence on housing and pre-sales and called for a paradigm shift to overcome the risk of economic fluctuations. As evidence-based alternatives for addressing the structural challenges facing the construction industry, she presented three global innovation cases: air-rights development over a Manhattan road (Rockefeller University's River Campus), risk distribution through a sublease model in Japan, and Daiwa House Industry's vertical integration of its forward and backward value chain.

Shin Dong-su, president of the Korea REITs Research Institute, proposed five key institutional reforms to drive growth in the domestic REITs sector. He said the reforms should include allowing the internal retention of asset-sale profits and removing criminal penalty provisions, simplifying paid-in capital increase procedures and revising the share-issuance pricing date standard to the board resolution date, easing large business group regulations to permit multi-tier structures, and allowing the securitization of factories within Greater Seoul industrial complexes.

A panel discussion moderated by Lee Sang-young, a professor in the real estate department at Myongji University, examined the paradigm shift in the future spatial industry and the direction of related policy. KREDII President Kim said the institute would "establish itself as a leading think tank that drives national urban policy by combining vivid voices from the field with precise data."