[Anchor]
Public feedback on the real estate tax revision proposal has already exceeded 5,000 submissions. Nearly all of them criticize the plan as unreasonable or problematic, prompting criticism that the government should have designed the proposal more meticulously before releasing it.
Reporter Kim Beom-joo explains the types of feedback coming in.
[Reporter]
This is the Ministry of Government Legislation website.
A legislative notice regarding the amendment to the Comprehensive Real Estate Holding Tax Act has been posted, and over 5,000 comments have already been left.
Various opinions are pouring in, pointing out issues such as tax hikes for single-home owners who do not reside in their properties and joint-ownership cases.
Understandably so, there are 2.1 million households in the greater Seoul metropolitan area where landlords rent out properties they do not live in themselves.
Factoring in multi-home owners and filtering them out to count only non-resident single-home owners yields an estimated 1 million people or so.
These non-resident single-home owners suddenly became a primary target for taxation in this tax revision proposal.
For instance, if a person owns a home valued just over 2 billion won based on market price, they are exempt from the comprehensive real estate holding tax if they reside in it, but non-residents will be required to pay 1.85 million won going forward.
Many people chose non-residency due to job relocations or childcare reasons, leading to complaints such as: Are we supposed to move every time that happens? Are you telling me to pay acquisition, registration, and brokerage fees nearing 100 million won by buying and selling a 2 billion won apartment right now?
The issue of jointly owned properties by spouses also exists.
Currently, basic deductions are applied when calculating the comprehensive real estate holding tax even for non-residents up to an official appraised value of 1.8 billion won, but this will be reduced to 800 million won in the future.
This is actually less than the deduction for single-ownership.
Six years ago in 2020, the National Assembly amended the law, encouraging joint ownership of homes by promising reductions in the comprehensive real estate holding tax.
As a result, the number of people who shifted apartments, villas, and officetels in Seoul to joint ownership has now increased to over 1.5 million.
Although the government claims it conducted simulation evaluations regarding how many people will have to pay more taxes due to non-resident single homes and joint ownership, how much more they will pay, and what impact it will have on the market, it has not released the results.
The government is coming out with damage control measures and explanations, stating that it will expand the categories of acceptable reasons for non-residency and allow joint owners to pay taxes under a single person's name.
However, it appears necessary to accept the criticism that policies should have been presented to the public only after thorough statistics and analysis were conducted from the outset.
(Video Editing: Kim Jong-mi, Design: Lee So-jung)
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