The Feasibility Analysis of Urban Public Rental Housing in Korea

Korean government has launched a new public rental housing policy for younger generation suffering from instable housing conditions in CBD area. This paper is to analyze the financial feasibility of urban public rental housing projects, based on its cash flows. Urban rental housing projects should find out the way to reduce costs and to secure cheap land, because of the high land price in CBD area and complex relationship of legal rights. Project types are categorized by the land acquisition method and district characteristics. For 10 sample projects, financial feasibility was analyzed. Cash flows were calculated on the design plan and 16 scenarios were made by combining 4 important variables. The variables are increase rate of land price, increase rate of monthly rents, ratio of public and market rents, and the interest rate of National Housing Fund. The findings are as follows. Government land rent-type can reduce initial costs because it is not necessary to buy land. However, total NPV is lowered at the time of liquidation due to the land return. Private land acquisition-type require more initial costs. But the NPV at liquidation time increases with land disposal. To improve financial feasibility, acquisition-type should be preferred in high land-price area and rent-type should be preferred in low land-price area. Among influencing variables, the rate of increase in land price and the ratio of public and market rents turned out to be the most important. Although the ratio of public and market rents can be controllable, high ratio will cause the burden of tenants. Therefore, interest rate adjustment of National Housing Fund is more desirable.