South Korea built its rental market on a system that only works when interest rates are high.


Now they're not.
It's called jeonse.
Tenants hand landlords a lump-sum deposit worth 50% to 80% of the property's value instead of monthly rent.
The landlord invests it, earns returns, returns the deposit two years later.
No rent. Just a bet on rates.
Those deposits now exceed 1.5 trillion KRW.
That's 75% of Korea's entire equity market cap.
Then rates fell.
Landlords couldn't generate returns on deposits they'd already spent. Leases expired. The money wasn't there.
Korea's own Minister of Land called it "a system whose time has passed."
It was never a real rental market as we know it.
It was a leveraged bet on interest rates.
Did South Korea just lose it?
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