Koreans Are Sleeping in Tents for Apartments That Were Empty for Two Years

The tent line that no one expected

On September 8, about 250 people stood in line outside a brand-new apartment complex in Daegu, South Korea. Some brought folding chairs. Others brought tents. The person at the front had been waiting 43 hours.

This was not a concert. It was a rental application.

The building — Sang-in Prezio Center Park in Dalseo-gu — had been completed in April 2024 and sat entirely empty for nearly two years. Zero contracts. Zero occupants. The developers tried everything: free balcony expansions, marketing pushes, late-night open houses. Nothing moved the units. By November 2024, only 58 people had applied, and of those, not a single contract was signed.

Then a real estate investment trust called CR REIT bought the entire complex — all 990 units — and listed them for rent at prices well below market.

The line formed the next morning.

Why this matters beyond Daegu

The story is not simply about one building finding tenants. It is about the structure of a housing market where newly constructed supply and desperate demand exist simultaneously, separated only by price.

The new units at Sang-in Prezio Center Park came in at 84-square-meter sizes for deposits of 222 to 238.5 million won ($160,000 to $172,000), and larger 113- to 117-square-meter units for 317 to 327 million won. Comparable units in a 2004-built nearby complex of the same name traded in April for roughly 220 million won. In other words, a two-year-old new building went on the market at prices matching or undercutting a 20-year-old one.

That gap does not happen in healthy markets. It happens when developers are trapped — locked into construction financing that matures, carrying costs that accumulate, and a buyer pool that has simply priced out of the market. The units are real. The need is real. The price was the only thing standing between them.

This tension is visible across East Asia. Tokyo saw similar patterns in the early 2000s when developers struggled to move newly built inventory in regional cities while demand clustered around the metropolis. Seoul’s situation is more compressed: the population concentration is sharper, the financing structure is different, and the social consequences are louder — people literally sleeping outdoors to secure a lease.

How the transaction actually works

CR REIT is not a charity. It is a structured product. The fund pools capital from investors, buys unsold completed units from developers at a discount, converts them to rentals, and holds them until the market recovers — at which point it sells. The risk of further price declines sits with the REIT and its investors, not with the tenants.

Tenants get three things: a brand-new unit, a deposit protected by the Housing & Urban Guarantee Corporation (HUG), and an option to convert their lease into a purchase later. The developer gets cash off its books. The REIT gets a yield. The government gets a headline it can point to when asked about housing policy.

This is not the first time it has happened in Daegu. CR REIT has acquired roughly 2,200 unsold completed units across the city alone since last year, according to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport data. The first major case was Suseong Lake Woobang IU Shell in Suseong-gu, where the contractor Woobang raised 46.7 billion won in capital and the REIT bought 288 of 394 units at 83 percent of appraised value — 125.5 billion won total. An 84-square-meter unit there rented for 230 million won in April, roughly 20 million won below comparable nearby buildings.

Another project, Billib Radice in Bondon-dong, was acquired by SV CR REIT — a fund set up by Shinsegae Property Investment Management — for 122.5 billion won covering 222 units in a 49-story mixed-use tower.

The pricing problem beneath the solution

The uncomfortable detail is that these transactions are not always clean. Some developers are resisting the sale prices. Industry sources note that REITs are typically buying at roughly a 30 percent discount to the original presale price, and the gap between what developers want and what investors will pay can stall deals for months.

That stall is precisely what left Sang-in Prezio Center Park empty. The developer, Daewoo Engineering & Construction, tried waiting out the market. When that failed, it shifted to a delayed-sales approach to recover construction costs. When that also stalled, CR REIT stepped in — but only after the units had already been sitting for nearly two years.

The government is trying to speed up these kinds of transactions. It recently extended a tax break through the end of 2027 that removes additional corporate tax and excludes these acquired non-metropolitan completed units from the comprehensive real estate tax calculation. The logic is blunt: tax relief will make the numbers work faster, and faster sales mean fewer empty buildings and fewer tent lines.

Who wins, who loses, who is left out

The tenants who got in line win. They secured a new apartment at a price that would have been impossible in the open market two years ago. Their deposits are guaranteed. They have an option to buy later if prices recover.

The REIT investors win, at least on paper. They are acquiring assets well below replacement cost with government backstops reducing their downside. The yield profile is favorable as long as occupancy holds.

The developer wins by exiting a losing position. Even at a discount, getting cash back on a completed but unsold asset is better than holding it forever and paying carrying costs on top of financing costs.

The people who did not get in line lose. The 250 applicants who showed up on September 8 were the ones who had heard about the opportunity early enough. The first round in June had already absorbed 550 units. The remaining 440 went quickly. Anyone who was not watching, who did not have the flexibility to take time off work, who did not know how to navigate the application system — they are still looking.

This is the second-order effect that makes the tent line troubling: it signals that the pressure is concentrated and immediate, and that access to relief is uneven. Housing assistance that requires you to camp outside to qualify is not a solution. It is an admission that the system has no other way to allocate scarcity.

What East Asian cities should watch

Three patterns from this case are worth tracking elsewhere.

First, the REIT conversion model. When completed housing cannot sell, turning it into rental stock is one of the few mechanisms that moves units without requiring new construction or massive government spending. Seoul is testing it. Tokyo has used similar structures. Other dense Asian cities with developer overhangs — Bangkok, Jakarta, even parts of greater Shanghai — could see variants of this play out if their own presale markets stall.

Second, the pricing signal. A new building renting for less than a 20-year-old one nearby is a data point, not an outlier. It tells you that the market is repricing from the bottom up, and that the gap between what was built and what people can pay has widened significantly. Watch for this pattern in any city where construction completed faster than household income growth.

Third, the social friction. The tent line is visible. It is shareable. It becomes a symbol. Governments that rely on market mechanisms to solve housing shortages without addressing the distribution problem will see those symbols multiply. The policy response tends to be either more tax breaks for the intermediaries or more direct subsidies for tenants — rarely both at once, and rarely with the scale the problem requires.

The empty building in Daegu is now full of tenants who camped to get there. The next one is probably already being built.