This article was posted on Nov. 6, 2025, at 2:12 p.m. on the ChosunBiz MoneyMove site.
The government halted all sales of state-owned property over concerns about "fire-sale" prices, and public institutions have withdrawn plans to sell real estate such as headquarters buildings. However, these listings had repeatedly been delayed because there were no buyers interested in purchasing them. Some public institutions, which are in a position of needing to shed bad assets as quickly as possible, say they are in an awkward position because of the government directive.
On the 6th, according to Onbid, the public auction portal of Korea Asset Management Corporation (KAMCO), the Korea Real Estate Board (KREB), a public institution under the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, canceled the sale notice for its Gumi headquarters building in Songjeong-dong, Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, on the 3rd. The reason given was "need to revise the notice." Originally, bidding for this building was to be accepted from Oct. 24 through that day with the bid opening scheduled for the 7th. The building, which has one basement level and four aboveground floors, sits on land of 2,623㎡ and has a total floor area of 2,170㎡.
After the Gumi branch of the Korea Real Estate Board (KREB) was closed, the board moved to dispose of the Gumi headquarters building from 2023 to improve management efficiency. But the sale was not easy. The Korea Real Estate Board (KREB) pursued the sale of the building 21 times from Feb. 2023 to the present, but all attempts failed. By simple calculation, that amounts to re-listing roughly every month and a half. In the process, the planned sale price fell by about 17.5%, from 7,453,400,000 won to 6,151,380,000 won.
Public institutions under the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, including Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), posted consecutive notices on the 4th and 5th that they would cancel the sale of the old Angang service center building of the Daegu headquarters Gyeongju branch, as well as sales of employee housing and land across the country, which had been scheduled to close bidding this month. Other public institutions, including Korea Water Resources Corporation (K-water), and organizations that had been pursuing sales of state-owned property, such as the Gyeongbuk Regional Postal Service and Kangwon National University, also issued cancellation notices in succession.
The wave of cancellation notices followed orders from President Lee Jae-myung. On the 3rd, the president instructed ministries and public institutions to halt sales of government assets that are currently underway or under review. He also added a condition that assets that must be sold for unavoidable reasons require prior approval from the prime minister.
At this year's National Assembly Strategy and Finance Committee audit, critics said that sales of state-owned real estate surged under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration and that many cases appeared to involve suspected "fire-sale" pricing. In 2022 the Yoon administration announced it would sell more than 16 trillion won of underutilized state-owned property over five years to promote a privately led virtuous economic cycle.
An analysis of "state-owned property sale status" data submitted to KAMCO by Heo Yeong of the Democratic Party of Korea shows that the number of lots put up for bidding in state-owned property sales was 173 in 2021 and 132 in 2022, but rose sharply to 460 in 2023 and 1,092 in 2024. This year, too, the upward trend continued, with 765 lots sold through August.
While the scale of sales grew, the bid-to-appraisal ratio plunged from 104.0% in 2022 to 77.7% in 2024 and to 73.9% in August 2025. Because sales were rushed to meet assigned targets, actual "fire-sale" transactions increased. According to the office of Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker Park Min-gyu, among state-owned properties sold by KAMCO, the share of sales with bid-to-appraisal ratios below the appraisal value was about 4.4%–11.0% from 2020 to 2022, but rose to 42.7% in 2023 and 58.7% in 2024. In particular, of the 795 sales made last year, 28 cases (3.5%) had bid-to-appraisal ratios of only 50%.
An industry source said, "There is a sense of relief that, in a market where real estate recovery is stubbornly weak, assets that did not need to be sold under government pressure can be spared from being handed over as a 'show' sale," but added, "From the public institutions' perspective, they need to sell noncore assets to improve management evaluation results, so being blocked all at once has left them in an awkward position."