The government has singled out multiple-home owners as the main culprits behind rising house prices and flagged tough loan curbs, but it is struggling to gather the basic statistics that would underpin the regulations. It had previewed strong restrictions on grounds that speculative demand from multiple-home owners drives up prices, yet there were not even accurate statistics.
According to the financial authorities on the 27th, the Financial Services Commission has requested major commercial banks and mutual finance institutions to submit detailed loan data on multiple-home owners and residential lease business operators as of today. For multiple-home owners, the information the Financial Services Commission is gathering is based on the number of dwellings owned by the borrower and includes ▲repayment type (principal-and-interest repayment, bullet with installment, etc.) ▲dwelling type (whether it is an apartment) ▲outstanding loan balance ▲maturity timing ▲location of the collateral property (whether it is in a regulated area), among others.
Residential lease business operators are categorized into four groups—individual business operators, corporate business operators, individual trading business operators, and corporate trading business operators—and the same data were requested as for multiple-home owners, including loan repayment type and dwelling type.
The reason the financial authorities asked for additional data is that the information they currently have is far from sufficient to craft regulations. For example, while there are materials such as the number of multiple-home owners by current residence region or by age, there are no detailed data on how many dwellings multiple-home owners living in Seoul own in Seoul, or whether those dwellings are townhouses or apartments. In several prior meetings, the financial authorities tried to reverse-estimate basic statistics from information held by the financial sector but failed.
The financial sector is busy securing information on multiple-home owners. That is because the data required by the authorities have not been handled until now. When banks review a mortgage loan, they check whether household members are homeowners and how many they own, but in screening loans for lease business operators, information on the borrower is not a mandatory item to verify and only information on the collateral property is collected.
The financial authorities are also working with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the National Tax Service to closely track the dwelling holdings of multiple-home owners. They plan to carry out the basic statistics work through this week and begin full discussions on the specific regulatory content next week. A senior official at the financial authorities said, "We will minimize damage by setting policy precisely based on accurate statistics."