Apartment Hunting in Seoul, Korea (Weolse vs Jeonse)

In Korea, the year-long contract you sign for your home typically renews itself without you having to talk to your landlord. Unless you’re choosing to move, it’s pretty rare to have your landlord contact you to make a change. Rare, but not never.

Last month, Kurt got a call from our (very nice) landlady who proposed switching our monthly rent (weolse) to a system called jeonse. With Jeonse, you put down a huge amount of money, but then you do not have to pay rent at all, typically for 2 years. Like the security deposits in a normal renting situation, you get that money back at the end of the 2 year contract. So if you’re okay with paying interest on a loan instead of rent, in a lot of cases it can actually save you money, but taking out that kind of loan isn’t easy for a lot of people. We talked it over and decided that we could, in fact, manage to do jeonse.

I thought that was the end of the conversation - that we can stay in our current beautiful apartment that has everything we need. But Kurt wanted to make sure this was the best option. In order to make sure that we couldn’t get a better deal elsewhere, we toured a few houses in the area in (and above) our price range.

In the end, we found that even if some places were newer or had more space, the things we find most important couldn’t be beat - our current place was best. In the end it worked out really well because our landlady agreed to something called ban-jeonse or “half jeonse” meaning we put down a big chunk of money, but not as big as regular jeonse. We will still pay rent but it is discounted from our current $850 to $650 which is great!

Hope you still enjoy the house tours even if we aren’t moving into any of them :)

You can check out my previous post about hunting for apartments in Seoul HERE!