Since inauguration of the Participatory Government, real estates centering about the apartment houses in Gangnam district have skyrocketed. The rising real estate prices has been 'a global phenomenon' due to the excessive liquidity accompanied by the ...
Since inauguration of the Participatory Government, real estates centering about the apartment houses in Gangnam district have skyrocketed. The rising real estate prices has been 'a global phenomenon' due to the excessive liquidity accompanied by the lower interest rates; the prices of the houses in metropolitan areas of the United States, the United Kingdom and China have more than doubled every year. However, the Participatory Government has been confident in suppressing the real estate prices only if the government should be directly involved in the real estate markets to check the speculative demands for real estates assuming that the real estate markets are imperfect. Over the last 4 years, the Participatory Government has some 50 real estate policies or once every 3~4 months with such warning messages as "Although the real estate prices rise throughout the world, Korea will be an exception," "We will not fail to win the war against the speculations," "Please, pay the composite real estate tax. This tax system will not change until the end of our regime," etc. Nevertheless, the effects of each real estate price stabilization policy would not last long, rather causing the real estate prices to rise rapidly.
The reason is that the Participatory Government has impromptu published tax-centered real estate price stabilization policies to check the speculative demands assuming that the real potential buyers would be speculative forces, rather than has supplied the houses required in the markets. After all, the anti-market real estate policies aimed at artificial downfall of the real estate prices have been over-issued only to amplify people's distrust of the policies. Ironically, the Participatory Government real estate policies have taught us a lesson that we would pay a great social cost if we should ignore the basic economic principle or the principle of supply and demand to insist on demand-checking policies and thereby loose the opportunities for supply of houses.
In their October 29 counter-measures, the Participatory Government adopted the composite real estate tax system as one of the means to increase the tax for the real estate ownerships. Nevertheless, the real estate prices stabilized hither-to began to rise rapidly due to the ultra-low interest rates and excessive liquidity increased by the land compensations in the name of the balanced development of the national lands, and thus, the Participatory Government issued August 31 counter-measures intensifying the composite real estate tax system; the sum of real estate ownership by person was replaced with the sum of real estate ownership by family, while the ceiling subject to the tax was lowered from 0.9 billion wons to 0.6 billion wons. However, the effects of the new counter-measures would not last for more than several months. Thus, they would be followed by stronger real estate price stabilization measures characterized by financial regulation, opening of the construction cost to public and ceiling of the selling price. After all, the real estate markets could be stabilized.
As discussed above, any real estate market stabilization measure would be less effective with the tax policies only but be more effective with other additional policies including financial ones. All in all, the policies made by non-professionals lacking a composite judgement about the real estate markets have resulted in skyrocketed housing prices painful to common people. Many experts opine that it would be desirable to use the tax policies as auxiliary policy tools for real estate market stabilization measures.
Such regulative policies as open construction cost system and price ceiling system put forwards by the Participatory Government recently is expected to help stabilize the real estate markets during the rule of the Participatory Government. However, in a longer term, the real estate markets would be too contracted to supply the houses or have them transacted smoothly. Experts fear that these and other side-effects would make the new ambitious measures fail in the end. We have already witnessed that local constructors are insolvent due to the unsold apartment houses, and it is reported that the government will purchase the unsold houses to operate them as rental houses in order to check the incidence of massive insolvencies. Nevertheless, such incidence is spreading to the capital areas.
Some experts say that it is necessary to comprehensively re-examine the real estate policies including real estate taxes rather than remedy the policy failure with people's tax payments used for purchases of unsold houses.
To do so, it is essential to prevent the ideological populism polices made in short terms by non-professionals even at the law-making stage and thereby, poll experts' opinions extensively for multi-faceted review of policy alternatives. Since economy is very complicated with its sectors interlocked with each other, it is necessary to minimize the unexpected side-effects of real estate policies and thereby, recover people's trust of them.
In this context, the real estate policies should be market-friendly without any taboos such as prohibition of reconstructions as desired by people rather than short-term regulations centered about anti-market real estate taxes. In addition, such tax bombs laid to check the overheated real estate markets earlier as the composite real estate tax should be reconsidered comprehensively because they are quite unbalanced with other asset taxes and because they transfer the responsibility for policy failure of the Participatory Government to the actual consumers for only the reason that they own houses.
This study polled real estate experts' opinions and examined the foreign cases to address the problems of the composite real estate tax or one of the real estate tax policies introduced by the Participatory Government and thereby, suggest their solutions.
So far, the successive governments have regarded any rapid rise of real estate prices as crisis of regime and thereby, have used some general short-term counter-measures, and have deregulated the real estate markets for recovery of economy when the unsold houses increased, receding the construction economy.
Recently, the Participatory Government put forward some deregulations in some regions as the real estate markets are recessed. Although there must be no absolute real estate policy not amendable as much as the Constitution, what is most urgent now is to implement the real estate policies in a longer term and consistently to recover people's trust of the government policies.