--- title: "South Korea’s President Fights the ‘Real Estate Republic’ One Reply Guy at a Time" description: "Lee Jae-myung blamed Yoon-era permitting cuts for soaring Seoul prices — by retweeting a user named ‘Traitor Lee Jae-myung’" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-05T07:15:37.648Z modified: 2026-10-05T10:15:40Z url: https://rews.cc/a/south-korea-s-president-fights-the-real-estate-republic-one--fa03be language: en tags: ["housing", "economy", "politics", "infrastructure", "policy", "asia"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # South Korea’s President Fights the ‘Real Estate Republic’ One Reply Guy at a Time *Lee Jae-myung blamed Yoon-era permitting cuts for soaring Seoul prices — by retweeting a user named ‘Traitor Lee Jae-myung’* By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/south-korea-s-president-fights-the-real-estate-republic-one--fa03be ## In brief - Lee Jae-myung said escaping the ‘real estate republic’ is a national task and vowed to keep his anti-speculation promise - He blamed Seoul price rises on a 2022-25 plunge in permits under the Yoon administration, plus lending and tax structures - Lee said permits and starts are rising and excess tax revenue will fund public long-term rentals for the young and middle class - He replied directly to a critical X user named ‘Traitor Lee Jae-myung’, asking voters to wait and judge by results - Seoul apartment prices have risen for a record 86 straight weeks despite government curbs, per KED Global Every South Korean president gets the same deal. You arrive in office promising to tame the housing market; the housing market, which is less a market than a national religion with a price index, goes up anyway; and eventually you find yourself explaining structural rigidity on social media to people whose handle is an insult aimed at you. President Lee Jae-myung reached that stage on Monday, when he took to X to declare that escaping the “real estate republic” is a national task and that he will “definitely keep the promise to escape the real-estate-speculation republic”. The immediate provocation was a post from an X user going by the name “Traitor Lee Jae-myung”, who wrote, roughly, “your real estate policy is a mess and that’s why Seoul prices are unstable”. Lee retweeted it and replied, at length. There is a school of political communication that says never amplify your hecklers. Lee has clearly enrolled in the other school, the one where you quote-tweet the guy named Traitor Lee Jae-myung and give him the full essay treatment. It is, at minimum, a confident move. His diagnosis has two parts. The short-term cause of the latest rise in capital-region apartment prices, he said, is supply: building permits plunged from 2022 to 2025, concentrated in Seoul, and the housing those permits would have produced is now missing from the market with a time lag. Those years were the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, so the blame assignment is not subtle. The medium-to-long-term causes, he said, are concentration in the capital region, excessive lending that encourages property speculation, and an unfair tax system. The fix, per Lee, is already turning: permits and construction starts have risen sharply since his government took office, new land development and conversions of existing sites and buildings to residential use are accelerating, and supply “will soon increase a lot”. On top of that, he said the government will use excess tax revenue to deliver large volumes of public long-term rental housing for young people and the middle class ahead of schedule. Note the elegance of that funding mechanism: a hot housing market generates stamp duties and capital gains receipts, and the government proposes to spend the proceeds of the boom on building houses to end the boom. If it works, it is wonderfully circular. If the boom ends first, the excess revenue presumably ends with it, but we do not need to dwell on that. Lee also did something presidents rarely do, which is admit that this keeps happening to everyone. Structural problems decades in the making, he wrote, do not improve quickly with a few short-term prescriptions, and every democratic government has tried to suppress real estate speculation without achieving its goals. One reason, he suggested, is that reforms get beaten back by resistance and backlash before they can be pushed through. Then the ask: even if you are disappointed, please wait a little longer with patience, and judge by the results. The problem with “judge by the results” is that the results keep arriving. Seoul apartment prices have now risen for a record 86 consecutive weeks despite government curbs, [KED Global reported](https://www.kedglobal.com/real-estate/newsView/ked202610010009) last week, and Lee has lately been vowing to clamp down on speculation “by any means necessary”. Meanwhile the opposition has found a pointed line of attack: several of Lee’s own cabinet nominees own Seoul apartments that have risen sharply in value — up 27 percent in a year, by [one tally](https://en.sedaily.com/finance/2026/09/07/minister-nominees-seoul-apartments-jumped-27-percent-in-a) — which sits awkwardly next to the administration’s line that homes are for living in, not holding. A government of landlords promising to abolish landlording as an investment strategy is not an impossible thing, but you can see why the Traitor Lee Jae-myung account has material. What Lee is really asking for is a grace period on a lagging indicator. Permits cratered, so supply is scarce now; permits are up, so supply will be plentiful later; therefore the current price surge is the previous government’s fault and the coming price stability will be his. As political accounting goes that is tidy. The history of Korean housing policy — by his own admission, a long series of failures by democratic governments of every stripe — suggests the indicator may keep lagging.