Is Busan property becoming oversupplied?

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Why is Busan property oversupply suddenly a serious question?

Busan property is showing enough stress today that oversupply can no longer be dismissed as a theoretical risk.

The clearest change is the amount of new housing that buyers have failed to absorb. According to Busan Metropolitan City’s latest official release, 8,379 homes were unsold at the end of July. One month earlier there were 8,071. The inventory is therefore still growing rather than clearing.

More worrying, 3,253 of those homes were already completed. Finished apartments sitting without buyers tell us much more than a weak presale launch does. Developers have spent the money, construction is over and the apartments are ready to occupy, yet thousands remain unsold.

Those three facts make the question worth asking now. Busan already has a backlog, a meaningful part of that backlog has survived all the way through completion, and more housing is coming.

There is one complication, though. Busan's rental market is still relatively tight, good projects can still attract buyers and some established districts are holding up much better than the city average. We therefore need to work out where the excess supply actually sits rather than applying the word “oversupply” to every apartment in Busan.

What we see now	Latest useful figure	Why we care
Unsold new homes	8,379	Buyers are not absorbing all new supply
Completed but unsold homes	3,253	A large backlog has survived through completion
Future completions	27,832 over two years	More housing is still entering the market
Apartment jeonse	Rising for 28 straight months	Occupier demand remains much healthier
Latest population	About 3.23 million	The long-term demand base is still shrinking

Is 8,379 unsold homes actually a lot for Busan?

Yes. Busan's current unsold inventory is far too large to treat as normal leftover stock.

The useful comparison is with the amount of housing the city typically completes. Real Estate R114 counted about 13,352 apartment completions in Busan in 2025. An unsold stock of 8,379 is equivalent to roughly 63% of that entire year's completions.

Put differently, Busan currently has almost two-thirds of a recent year's new supply still sitting somewhere in the unsold pipeline.

The comparison does not mean that all 8,379 apartments were built in 2025. They come from different projects and stages. It does tell us the order of magnitude of the problem. A few hundred leftovers in a city the size of Busan would be easy to absorb. More than 8,000 is large enough to influence developer pricing, future launches and the resale market around weaker projects.

The trend also matters. Busan has now spent several months around or above the 8,000 mark. Inventory that stays elevated through repeated reporting periods is much harder to explain as one unusually bad launch.

There is still a path out. Developers are building fewer apartments than during the previous peak, and enough sales could gradually bring inventory down. We simply do not see that clearing process clearly enough yet.

Measure	Units	Useful comparison	Approximate scale
Current unsold homes	8,379	2025 completions: 13,352	63%
Current completed-unsold homes	3,253	2025 completions: 13,352	24%
2022 completions	24,289	2025 completions: 13,352	Supply has fallen about 45%
Coming two-year completions	27,832	Current unsold: 8,379	Existing backlog equals about 30%

Are Busan's completed unsold apartments the real red flag?

Yes. Busan's 3,253 completed unsold homes are the strongest evidence that the new-build market already has too much stock for today's buyers.

Presale inventory is ambiguous. Buyers may wait until construction advances. A project can launch into a bad month. Developers may release units gradually. Financing conditions can temporarily reduce applications.

Completed inventory leaves less room for those explanations.

Busan had 3,249 completed-unsold homes near the beginning of the year. The number dropped below 3,000 in spring, which looked encouraging for a while, then climbed to 3,292 in June before easing marginally to 3,253 in July.

That trajectory is more important than the latest monthly drop. Busan has spent much of the year carrying roughly 3,000 finished homes that developers still cannot clear.

And the stock is not disappearing quickly. The reduction from June to July was just 39 homes. At that pace, talking about a meaningful normalization would be premature.

Completed-unsold inventory also changes developer behaviour. A company holding an unfinished project can wait for better sales conditions. Once hundreds of finished apartments are sitting on the balance sheet, carrying costs become harder to ignore. Discounts, free options, subsidized financing and more flexible contract terms become increasingly rational.

So if we had to choose one number to watch from here, it would be this one rather than total construction starts.

Are people simply refusing to buy new Busan apartments?

A lot of them are, but Busan buyers are being selective rather than disappearing altogether.

The contrast between two recent launches makes this unusually clear.

Eco Delta City Jungheung S-Class River City in Gangseo offered 501 apartments. According to Korea Real Estate Board CheongyakHome data, its special supply attracted just 17 applications. After unsold special-supply units rolled into the general allocation, 484 apartments were available in the first round and only 38 applications arrived. That is a first-round ratio of roughly 0.08 applicant per available home.

The project was not obviously aimed at the luxury market. It consisted entirely of 59-square-metre apartments, the highest prices were around ₩399 million to ₩421 million, the project had a price ceiling and the contract deposit was only 5%. Buyers still barely showed up.

Then look at The Sharp Tricent in Nam-gu. CheongyakHome recorded 1,244 first-round applications for just 68 general-sale homes, giving the project an average competition ratio of 18.29 to 1. Every unit type cleared.

That is a huge gap within the same city and the same broad housing cycle.

Busan therefore still has plenty of people prepared to buy the right new apartment. What has broken down is developers' ability to assume that newness alone will create demand.

Location, price, surrounding infrastructure, redevelopment potential and the amount of competing supply now decide whether a project sells.

Recent Busan launch	Area	General-sale outcome	What buyers told us
Eco Delta City Jungheung S-Class River City	Gangseo	Roughly 0.08:1 in first round	Very weak demand despite accessible pricing
The Sharp Tricent	Nam-gu	18.29:1	Strong demand still exists for preferred projects
River City special supply	Gangseo	17 applicants for 325 initial special-supply units	Weakness appeared before general sale
The Sharp Tricent special supply	Nam-gu	460 applications for 88 homes	Demand was broad, not just one lucky unit type

Does weak presale demand mean Busan has too many homes?

Busan currently has too many new homes at the prices and locations developers are offering, which is the version of oversupply that actually matters to investors.

Physical housing need and effective buying demand are different things.

A household may need somewhere to live and still refuse a ₩500 million new apartment. It may rent instead. It may buy a ten-year-old apartment nearby for less. It may wait for interest rates to improve. Or it may choose a completely different district.

That is exactly why Busan can have thousands of unsold new apartments while its jeonse market remains tight.

The enormous difference between recent Gangseo and Nam-gu subscription results also rules out an easy explanation based purely on citywide demand. If Busan had simply run out of people willing to buy homes, a project would struggle almost regardless of location. The Sharp Tricent did the opposite.

What we are seeing these days looks more like a mismatch between what developers built and what buyers are willing to pay for.

This kind of price-sensitive oversupply can correct faster than pure demographic oversupply. Developers can cut effective prices, postpone launches or stop building weak projects.

But there is a limit. Busan's demographics are also moving in the wrong direction, which means developers cannot rely forever on population growth eventually rescuing badly placed supply.

Are Busan apartment prices already falling because of oversupply?

Busan apartment prices are soft enough to confirm weak buying demand, but there is still no citywide crash.

The resale market lost momentum after improving earlier in the year. Recent transaction data show 2,404 apartment sales reported for July, down 9.2% from June and 12.0% from the same month a year earlier.

Transaction volume often weakens before owners across an entire city start accepting dramatically lower prices. Sellers can initially hold their asking prices, leaving buyers and sellers far apart and reducing the number of completed deals.

Price data are more mixed. The median reported sale price per square metre in July was around ₩4.945 million, about 1.4% below a year earlier, although we should not read too much into one citywide median because the mix of apartments sold changes every month.

The district differences are much more useful. Suyeong's July median price per square metre was around ₩7.64 million, far above the city average. Busanjin had the largest number of transactions, with 328 reported sales, and a median price around ₩5.0 million per square metre. Busan's most active, most expensive and weakest markets are different places.

For now, oversupply is appearing first through weak liquidity, difficult presales and widening gaps between projects. Saying prices are collapsing would go too far.

If Busan has too much housing, why are rents still going up?

Busan rents are still rising because the current glut is concentrated in homes for sale rather than every kind of housing people actually want to occupy.

According to Korea Real Estate Board data reported by Busan MBC, apartment jeonse prices have now risen for 28 consecutive months. In the second week of August alone, the city's apartment jeonse index increased another 0.05%.

That is a remarkably persistent run for a city supposedly drowning in housing.

A recent transaction in Nam-gu shows what renters are facing. Busan MBC reported a 24-pyeong apartment signing a jeonse contract around ₩500 million, while a comparable unit subsequently rented for around ₩2 million per month.

Rising rents tell us that occupier demand remains stronger than the new-build sales numbers suggest. Households still need apartments, but many are reluctant or unable to become buyers at today's purchase prices and financing costs.

That is why the apparent contradiction makes sense. Busan can have excess inventory in the ownership market while good rental apartments remain difficult to find.

It is one of the strongest reasons we would avoid describing the whole Busan housing market as oversupplied.

Part of the market	What is happening now	Our reading
New-build sales	Many projects struggling	Clearly oversupplied in weaker segments
Existing-home sales	Volume has softened	Buyers remain cautious
Jeonse	Rising for 28 months	Occupier demand is still strong
Strong new projects	Can still attract double-digit competition	Demand has become selective
Weak peripheral projects	Some barely attract applications	Location and price mismatch is severe

Is Busan's shrinking population making the oversupply problem worse?

Yes. Busan's shrinking population makes today's new-build backlog much harder to shrug off as a temporary sales slump.

Busan Metropolitan City's latest population briefing puts the city's population at 3,230,982. The total fell by another 1,388 people in the latest monthly reading and was down 20,460 over the comparison period used by the city.

Ageing is just as important. Busan now has 846,794 residents aged 65 or older, equal to 25.6% of its population. Only about 9.1% are children.

The direction of travel is clear. Developers are trying to sell new housing into a city whose underlying pool of residents keeps getting smaller and older.

Domestic migration is still negative too. The most recent figure in Busan's population briefing showed a net loss of 661 people in one month. That is better than the much larger outflows Busan used to record, so the demographic story is not deteriorating at the same speed forever. But improvement from “losing people quickly” to “losing people more slowly” still leaves developers with a weak demand base.

This does not mean every district has to shrink. Households can move from older neighbourhoods into Haeundae, Gangseo, Busanjin or redevelopment areas and make those local markets grow.

For Busan as a whole, population decline raises the bar for every large new development. New housing increasingly has to steal demand from existing neighbourhoods rather than rely on a growing city to fill everything.

Doesn't Busan still need more homes because households are getting smaller?

Smaller households are keeping Busan's housing demand stronger than its falling population suggests, but that cushion will not last forever.

Housing is consumed by households, not individual residents. Three million people split into 1.6 million households need far more homes than the same population split into one million households.

That has helped Korea avoid a simple one-for-one relationship between population decline and housing demand. Single-person households, elderly residents living alone and smaller families have all pushed the number of households higher even where total population has stopped growing.

Busan benefits from the same effect today.

The long-term projections are less reassuring. Statistics Korea expects household numbers eventually to decline in Busan, putting the city among the regions where shrinking household formation will ultimately reinforce population decline rather than offset it.

The timing is what investors should care about. There is no demographic cliff tomorrow morning. Smaller households can support housing demand for years even as population falls.

But Busan developers cannot assume that household growth will absorb an unlimited supply of new apartments through the 2030s.

For a market already carrying thousands of unsold new homes, that makes today's inventory more important than it would be in a fast-growing city.

Is Busan about to get flooded with another wave of apartments?

Busan still has a big completion pipeline coming, although construction has already fallen sharply from its previous peak.

The newest joint forecast from the Korea Real Estate Board and Real Estate R114 expects 27,832 공동주택 units to be completed between the second half of 2026 and the first half of 2028.

Among Korea's major metropolitan cities outside the Seoul region, that is a large number. For comparison, the same forecast gives Daegu just 5,377 units, Gwangju 14,515, Daejeon 21,602 and Ulsan 14,208.

Busan's pipeline is therefore unusual enough to pay attention to.

There is better news when we zoom out. Real Estate R114 counted 24,289 Busan apartment completions in 2022 and only 13,352 in 2025. Annual completions had already fallen by roughly 45%.

So developers have responded to weaker conditions. Busan is no longer building at the pace seen around the previous peak.

The trouble is that lower future construction does not erase stock already left behind. As seen above, the city enters this next completion period carrying 8,379 unsold homes. That backlog is equivalent to roughly 30% of the entire two-year completion forecast.

Those categories cannot simply be added together because some current unsold homes belong to projects completing within the forecast period. Still, the comparison shows why today's inventory is large enough to affect the next cycle.

Metropolitan market	Expected completions over the coming two years
Busan	27,832
Daejeon	21,602
Gwangju	14,515
Ulsan	14,208
Daegu	5,377

Is Busan property oversupplied everywhere?

No. Busan's oversupply is heavily concentrated, and treating all 16 districts and counties as one market hides most of the useful information.

Recent transactions show an enormous price gap across the city. Suyeong recorded a median apartment sale price of about ₩7.64 million per square metre in July, the highest among districts with enough reported transactions. Busan's citywide median was about ₩4.95 million.

Demand is also clustering. Busanjin alone accounted for 328 reported apartment sales that month, or 13.6% of the city total. The three busiest districts together accounted for 36.5%.

New-build demand tells the same story even more dramatically. Nam-gu's The Sharp Tricent attracted more than 18 first-round applicants for every available general-sale apartment. Gangseo's Eco Delta City River City could not attract even one applicant for every ten available units.

We should expect this divergence to continue.

Established districts offer jobs, schools, subway access, retail, hospitals and existing communities today. Large peripheral developments often ask buyers to pay for amenities and transport improvements that will arrive later.

That does not make peripheral projects bad investments by definition. Gangseo, for example, has been attracting residents while several older Busan districts lose them. Western Busan also has major long-term development plans.

But “Busan has too many apartments” is too crude to be useful. A more accurate statement is that some parts of Busan have far more new housing than buyers currently want, while desirable apartments elsewhere remain scarce enough to support rents and successful launches.

Is Eco Delta City becoming the clearest oversupply test in Busan?

Yes. Eco Delta City now gives us one of the clearest real-world tests of whether long-term development plans can outrun short-term housing demand.

The area was once almost absurdly easy to sell.

Gangseo Xi Eco Delta recorded an average first-round competition ratio of roughly 115 to 1 in 2022. Other early Eco Delta projects also attracted dozens of applicants per home.

Fast-forward to the latest cycle and River City managed roughly 0.08 to 1 in the first round.

That is a collapse in buyer urgency of more than three orders of magnitude compared with the most successful early launches.

The interesting part is that Gangseo itself still has a credible growth story. It has attracted net migration, it sits inside Busan's western expansion corridor and Eco Delta City is supposed to mature into a major new residential and employment area.

Those positives actually make the weak subscription result more informative. We cannot simply blame a dying district where nobody wants to live. Buyers appear to be saying that the amount of housing, timing, location within the wider area and asking prices have moved ahead of what they are currently willing to absorb.

Eco Delta City could still work very well over the long term. A successful new city can take years to mature.

For buyers entering now, though, “it will eventually have infrastructure” is no substitute for checking how much competing housing will arrive before that demand catches up.

Are high new-build prices making Busan look more oversupplied than it really is?

Yes. Part of Busan's apparent oversupply comes from developers asking buyers to absorb expensive new construction when cheaper existing apartments are already available.

The economics of new development have become difficult. Korean construction costs have risen substantially over the past several years, while labour, financing and land costs remain high. Developers therefore cannot slash launch prices as easily as buyers might expect from a weak market.

That creates a stand-off.

Buyers compare a new apartment against existing homes nearby. Developers compare the same apartment against what it cost to build.

When those two reference points move too far apart, subscriptions collapse even if people still want to live in the area.

The latest Busan launches show how unforgiving buyers have become. River City struggled despite units topping out around the low ₩400 millions, while The Sharp Tricent in Nam-gu could sell units priced much higher because buyers placed a much higher value on the project's location and proposition.

So price alone does not explain everything. Price relative to perceived quality does.

This also tells us how part of the oversupply will probably clear. We are more likely to see free options, interest support, smaller deposits, discounts on remaining units, slower launches and delayed projects than one giant citywide price cut.

Developers eventually have to bring the effective purchase price closer to what buyers think each location is worth.

Could rising Busan rents pull people back into buying?

Yes. Busan's rising jeonse market could gradually turn some renters into buyers, especially in established neighbourhoods.

Twenty-eight consecutive months of rising apartment jeonse prices changes the rent-versus-buy calculation.

When deposits and monthly rents rise while apartment sale prices remain flat, the financial gap between renting and owning starts to narrow. A household planning to stay in the same neighbourhood for ten years may eventually decide that buying makes more sense.

That process can help absorb resale inventory and eventually support selected new projects.

We should not expect it to work evenly across Busan. A renter competing for a scarce apartment in Suyeong or Haeundae does not automatically become a buyer for a new unit in Gangseo simply because the maths looks attractive.

Housing decisions remain extremely local.

This is why the rental trend gives us more confidence in prime and established Busan housing than in the citywide new-build market. There is still real underlying demand. Buyers have simply become much less willing to accept whatever developers put in front of them.

If jeonse keeps rising while sale prices stay weak, that gap becomes one of the best potential stabilizers for Busan property.

What would make Busan's property oversupply become genuinely dangerous?

Busan's oversupply would become much more dangerous if finished inventory keeps rising while the next completion wave arrives and rental strength finally starts to weaken.

We would worry most about completed-unsold homes. The current 3,253 figure already tells us developers are struggling to clear finished projects. A sustained move toward 4,000 or 5,000 would show that new completions are arriving faster than buyers can absorb them.

The pipeline would then become much more threatening. Another 27,832 homes are expected to complete over the coming two years. If new-project subscriptions stay weak throughout that period, developers could end up competing with their own previous unsold stock.

A sharp reversal in jeonse would make the picture worse again. Rising rents currently tell us that Busan still has decent occupier demand. Falling rents alongside rising vacancy and rising unsold inventory would be much closer to a genuine citywide housing glut.

Prices would probably react unevenly. Weak peripheral developments and ordinary apartments with a lot of nearby competition would feel the pressure first. Scarce homes in Suyeong, Haeundae or high-demand redevelopment locations could hold up considerably better.

The dangerous scenario is therefore less dramatic than “Busan crashes everywhere.” A long period of heavy discounting, weak resale liquidity and falling real prices in oversupplied districts is more plausible.

How will we know Busan's oversupply is finally clearing?

Busan's oversupply will be clearing when finished unsold apartments fall consistently and ordinary new projects can sell without exceptional discounts.

Total unsold inventory should fall materially from today's level rather than moving between 8,000 and 9,000.

Completed-unsold homes matter even more. We would become substantially more comfortable if that figure moved below roughly 2,000 and stayed there. A one-month drop of a few dozen homes does not tell us much.

Subscription results also need to broaden. Busan does not need every project to reproduce The Sharp Tricent's 18-to-1 result. We do need to stop seeing projects where fewer than one in ten available homes attracts a first-round applicant.

Transaction volume would ideally recover alongside that improvement. Buyers returning only because developers offer huge incentives would clear inventory, but it would hardly show that the underlying market had become strong.

Finally, we would want the rental market to remain firm. That would confirm that Busan's underlying demand for good housing is still intact while the excess new-build stock is being worked through.

What to watch	Situation now	A much healthier level
Total unsold homes	8,379	Clear sustained decline, ideally toward 6,000 or lower
Completed-unsold homes	3,253	Below roughly 2,000 and still falling
Weak project subscriptions	Some below 0.1:1	Ordinary projects regularly clear 1:1
Apartment transactions	Latest reported month down 12% YoY	Sustained recovery rather than one strong month
Jeonse market	Rising	Continued firmness while sales inventory clears

So, is Busan property becoming oversupplied?

Yes, Busan's new-build property market is already oversupplied, but the evidence does not support calling the entire city a housing glut.

We have enough evidence to be firm about the first part.

Busan has 8,379 unsold new homes. More than 3,200 are already finished. Some recent projects have produced extraordinarily weak subscription results, and the city still has almost 28,000 공동주택 completions expected over the coming two years.

Busan's demographics add a structural problem. The population is now around 3.23 million and still falling, one-quarter of residents are already 65 or older, and domestic migration remains negative. New developments increasingly have to win households away from existing Busan neighbourhoods rather than wait for citywide population growth to fill them.

The broader housing market looks healthier than those numbers initially suggest. Apartment jeonse prices have risen for 28 consecutive months, showing that people still compete for housing they actually want. The Sharp Tricent recently attracted 1,244 first-round applications for only 68 general-sale apartments. District price and transaction data also show a large gap between preferred locations and weaker parts of the city.

As seen above, that contrast is too large to ignore.

Our answer is therefore more specific than a simple yes or no. Busan has built too many new apartments for the number of buyers currently willing to pay developers' prices, especially in locations where large amounts of competing supply have arrived ahead of established demand.

That problem is real today, and it could get worse before the incoming completion pipeline peaks.

But good Busan property is not suddenly abundant. Established neighbourhoods, scarce redevelopment sites and apartments in places where residents genuinely want to live can stay tight even while thousands of weaker new units struggle to find buyers.

The next Busan property cycle is likely to punish mediocre supply far more than the city itself.

Who is the author of this content?

BAMBOOROUTES

A team specialized in real estate investing in APAC countries (Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, etc.).

We are a team of financial experts, legal professionals, developers, and local real estate specialists dedicated to helping people like you avoid mistakes when investing in real estate in a foreign place, particularly in Busan. If you’d like to learn more about us, you can check our presentation page.