jeonse

Jeonse: Korea’s Disappearing Deposit System, Explained

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The landlord gives the house keys to the tenant under the lease agreement.

Every English-language guide to living in Korea explains jeonse (전세) the same way: instead of paying monthly rent, you hand the landlord an enormous lump sum, live there for two years, and get all of it back when you leave. No rent. Just a deposit. It sounds impossible, and it is one of the genuinely … Read more

Korean Apartments: Why Half the Country Lives in Towers

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Rows of identical high-rise residential towers seen from below

Fly into Incheon, take the train toward Seoul, and you will pass them for forty minutes without a break — identical towers in blocks of eight or twelve, numbered in enormous digits on their sides, repeating across the landscape. Visitors often read this as bleak. Korean apartments house roughly half the country’s population, and the … Read more