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SUMMARY
Yes. Daegu apartment prices are very likely near the bottom now, although being near the bottom is not the same thing as already being in a broad recovery.
The clearest change is not one positive week in the price index. It is that the forces that drove the crash are disappearing at the same time: unsold inventory is much lower, completions are collapsing and jeonse prices have started rising.
Daegu has already cleared roughly 69% of the unsold homes accumulated at the 2023 peak. The remaining problem is harder, though, because 3,481 completed homes are still unsold and now represent the stubborn final part of the inventory cleanup.
The supply pipeline may be the strongest argument for a floor. Daegu went from roughly 36,000 completions around the peak supply year to a latest estimate of only 5,377 homes scheduled from the second half of 2026 through the first half of 2028.
Rents are also moving before sale prices. Six consecutive weekly increases in apartment jeonse prices suggest actual housing demand is tightening even while buyers remain cautious about committing to purchases.
Transaction volumes do not look like the start of another speculative boom, and that may be healthy. Daegu has enough activity to keep clearing apartments, but not enough urgency to create bidding wars or another immediate supply response from developers.
The citywide average is increasingly hiding several different local markets. Jung-gu and a few other areas are already recording repeated gains, while Dalseo-gu still combines the largest unsold inventory with some of the weakest weekly price movements.
Daegu's population decline remains a genuine long-term constraint, but it is not translating one-for-one into fewer households. The city lost population during 2025 while still adding roughly 8,400 households, which helps explain why housing demand can stabilize even with unfavorable demographics.
More than 50,000 approved homes could eventually become a new supply problem, but approval is not the same as construction. Developers have become reluctant to launch into a selective market where construction costs push new-build pricing well above what many buyers are prepared to pay.
The most likely next phase is therefore a drawn-out bottom rather than a dramatic rebound. Stronger neighborhoods can recover first, rents can continue tightening and weaker projects can still fall, while the citywide index spends months hovering around zero before the downturn is clearly over.
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Are Daegu apartment prices finally near the bottom?
Daegu apartment prices look close to the bottom now, but the city has probably entered the last stage of the downturn rather than the first stage of a real recovery.
The latest numbers capture that awkward middle ground quite well. Korea Real Estate Board data show Daegu apartment prices falling another 0.01% in the latest weekly reading, their third consecutive decline. Yet the drops have become tiny. Earlier this summer, Daegu even managed its first weekly increase after 132 weeks without one, and later returned to flat prices before slipping again.
Meanwhile, several things underneath the headline index have improved. Daegu's unsold housing stock fell to 4,278 homes in the latest Ministry of Land count, down from almost 14,000 at the 2023 peak. Completed unsold apartments also declined to 3,481 after briefly rising the previous month. Jeonse prices have now increased for six consecutive weeks. And the supply pipeline has been cut dramatically.
Taken together, this looks like a market that is struggling to fall much further.
We would still stop short of saying the citywide bottom has definitely passed. Daegu sale prices keep bouncing around zero without staying positive, Dalseo-gu remains weak, and more than 3,000 newly completed apartments are still sitting unsold.
Our current read is fairly sharp: Daegu is probably near its cyclical floor. Anyone waiting for another collapse on the scale of 2022-2024 is now betting against a very different supply-and-demand setup.
| What we would expect near a bottom | What Daegu shows now | Our read | Strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price declines getting smaller | Latest weekly move around -0.01% | Happening | Strong |
| Occasional positive weeks | First increase after 132 weeks | Happening | Moderate |
| Unsold inventory falling | 4,278 versus 13,987 peak | Happening fast | Strong |
| Finished unsold inventory falling | 3,481 latest | Finally improving again | Moderate |
| Rental prices firming | Six straight weekly increases | Happening | Strong |
| New supply drying up | Very low pipeline through 2028 | Happening sharply | Very strong |
| Broad sale-price recovery | Several districts still falling | Missing | Weak |
How bad was the Daegu apartment crash?
The Daegu apartment crash was severe enough that most of the easy downside has probably already happened.
Daegu went into the downturn earlier and harder than many Korean cities. According to Korea Real Estate Board data, apartment prices dropped about 11.9% during 2022 alone after rising 8.5% the year before. Jeonse prices fell roughly 14.3% that year.
The weakness then kept going.
By 2025, local analyses using the Real Estate Board index placed Daegu's apartment sales index around 89 on a 2015 base of 100, compared with roughly 121 near the 2021 high. The exact percentage loss depends on the index period being compared, but the broader point is clear: Daegu gave back a very large part of its previous boom.
The duration was just as unusual as the size. Daegu eventually went 132 consecutive weeks without a weekly apartment-price increase. During the worst part of that period, buyers faced falling prices, rising mortgage costs, huge numbers of incoming apartments and nearly 14,000 unsold homes at the same time.
Most of those pressures are weaker today.
That changes the question completely. Three years ago we were trying to work out how far a severe oversupply correction could go. These days we are trying to determine whether the remaining discounts are enough to clear the last difficult inventory.
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Have Daegu apartment prices actually stopped falling?
Daegu apartment prices have almost stopped falling, although they still cannot hold a sustained increase.
The most recent Korea Real Estate Board reading showed the city's apartment sale-price index down 0.01% week on week. That was the third consecutive decline, so calling a recovery now would be too generous.
But look at the size of the movements.
Daegu returned to 0.00% in an earlier weekly reading after eight weeks of declines. Before that, the city recorded a 0.01% weekly increase, ending an extraordinary 132-week period without a gain.
Then prices slipped again.
The latest district figures show how messy the turn has become. Jung-gu rose around 0.10% in one recent week and had been increasing for 13 consecutive weeks. Dalseong-gun also rose 0.02%. Dong-gu edged higher. Meanwhile Dalseo-gu fell 0.07% and Suseong-gu slipped 0.03%.
We take this pattern more seriously than one citywide +0.01% reading. Several parts of Daegu are now repeatedly rising while others continue to clear excess stock.
Calling the exact week of the bottom is almost impossible. The city is already breaking into local markets that are reaching their floors at different times.
Has Daegu finally cleared its huge unsold apartment problem?
Daegu has cleared roughly seven out of every ten unsold homes from the 2023 peak, which is one of the clearest reasons the apartment downturn looks late-cycle today.
Daegu Metropolitan Government counted 13,987 unsold homes at the peak in February 2023. At the time, Daegu alone represented roughly 18.5% of South Korea's unsold housing inventory.
The latest Ministry of Land and Daegu City data put that number at 4,278.
That leaves Daegu with around 9,700 fewer unsold homes than at the peak, a decline of roughly 69%.
There was a wobble along the way. Unsold inventory rose from 4,298 to 4,383 in June, ending an 11-month run of declines. The latest reading then dropped back to 4,278.
The harder inventory has also started moving in the right direction again. Completed unsold housing fell from 3,575 to 3,481 after rising the previous month.
That last figure still deserves caution. Daegu's 3,481 completed unsold homes represented almost 12% of the entire national total, the largest stock among South Korea's 17 provinces and metropolitan cities for a sixth consecutive month.
So the cleanup is real, but it has reached the difficult final portion.
| Daegu unsold housing | Homes | Change | What we learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 peak | 13,987 | — | Full oversupply crisis |
| May 2026 | 4,298 | -69.3% from peak | Most excess already absorbed |
| June 2026 | 4,383 | +2.0% monthly | Brief setback |
| Latest reading | 4,278 | -2.4% monthly | Decline resumes |
| Completed unsold, latest | 3,481 | -2.6% monthly | Difficult stock finally falls again |
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Is Daegu's apartment oversupply finally ending?
Daegu's apartment oversupply is ending much faster than its price index suggests.
This is probably the strongest piece of the bottom argument.
Daegu absorbed an extraordinary supply wave around the worst part of the crash. Roughly 36,000 homes were scheduled for completion in 2023. During 2022-2024, annual move-ins averaged around 25,100 units.
That pace has collapsed.
Move-ins fell to roughly 12,440 homes in 2025. Earlier market estimates put 2026 at about 8,172 apartments excluding rentals.
Now we have an even fresher official-style estimate. Korea Real Estate Board and Real Estate R114 recently calculated that only 5,377 Daegu homes are scheduled for completion from the second half of 2026 through the first half of 2028. That includes just 729 during the remaining part of 2026, 2,846 in 2027 and 1,802 during the first half of 2028.
The forecast differs somewhat from earlier local estimates because the periods and project coverage differ, but both datasets point in the same direction: Daegu is heading into a remarkably thin completion cycle.
Compare roughly 36,000 completions around the peak supply year with only a few thousand per year now. Even if projects get added or delayed, that is an enormous change.
And because apartments take years to plan, finance and construct, developers cannot suddenly produce another 30,000 homes if prices improve next spring.
The oversupply that crushed Daegu apartment prices is therefore losing its ability to keep crushing them.
| Supply period | Approximate homes | What was happening |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | ~36,000 | Peak completion shock |
| 2022-2024 average | ~25,100 a year | Sustained heavy supply |
| 2025 | ~12,440 | Supply roughly halves |
| 2026 earlier estimate | ~8,172 | Below 10,000 |
| H2 2026 to H1 2028 latest estimate | 5,377 total | Extremely thin pipeline |
Are buyers actually coming back to Daegu apartments?
Daegu apartment buyers have come back from the crash lows, but lately they have become more selective again rather than more aggressive.
Daegu apartment transaction volume had previously recovered to around its long-run monthly norms after collapsing during the worst part of the downturn. October 2025, for example, produced roughly 2,450 transactions in one local compilation, about 2.7 times the late-2022 low.
The latest complete monthly picture is softer.
A compilation based on Ministry of Land transaction filings counted 1,946 apartment sales in June and 1,660 in July. July was therefore down 14.7% from June and 10.4% from the same month one year earlier.
Daegu buyers have clearly stopped behaving as if every apartment purchase is dangerous, but they are hardly rushing into the market.
Dalseo-gu still produced 387 July sales, or roughly 23% of the entire city's transactions. Suseong-gu recorded close to 300. Buk-gu was also active.
That is enough liquidity to clear apartments without creating bidding wars.
And that is probably what Daegu needs right now. A bottom can form with boring transaction numbers. The real question is whether sellers can keep moving homes without cutting prices another 10%.
So far, they increasingly can.
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Where are Daegu apartment prices still falling hardest?
Dalseo-gu remains the clearest weak spot in Daegu's apartment market, while Jung-gu and a handful of better-positioned neighborhoods are already behaving very differently.
The latest weekly Real Estate Board data make the gap unusually visible.
Dalseo-gu apartment prices fell around 0.07% in one recent week, the largest drop among Daegu's districts. At the same time Jung-gu increased roughly 0.10%, extending an increase that had already lasted 13 consecutive weeks.
That is a serious divergence.
Inventory helps explain it. The latest district-level figures put Dalseo-gu's unsold stock at 1,164 homes, more than anywhere else in Daegu. Buk-gu had 769, Jung-gu 725, Nam-gu 524, Suseong-gu 510 and Dong-gu 491.
Dalseo-gu alone therefore carries more than one-quarter of the city's remaining unsold housing.
Yet it also generated the most transactions in July.
We read that combination as active price discovery. People still want apartments there, but there is enough choice that sellers have very little pricing power.
Jung-gu has moved further along the adjustment. Its continuing weekly gains suggest enough inventory has been absorbed in selected areas for buyers to start competing again.
Suseong-gu is more complicated than the old "premium district always recovers first" story. It has strong school and location demand, and its jeonse market is doing particularly well, but weekly sale prices have recently moved both up and down. We would therefore avoid claiming that Suseong-gu as a whole has already bottomed.
Daegu currently has several different bottoms happening at once.
| District | Recent weekly sale move | Latest unsold stock | What we see |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jung-gu | ~+0.10% | 725 | Clear recent improvement |
| Dalseo-gu | ~-0.07% | 1,164 | Still the main weak spot |
| Suseong-gu | ~-0.03% | 510 | Premium demand, mixed sale prices |
| Dong-gu | ~+0.01% | 491 | Stabilizing |
| Buk-gu | ~0.00% | 769 | Close to flat |
| Dalseong-gun | ~+0.02% | 30 | Very little unsold inventory |
Are Daegu rents recovering before apartment prices?
Daegu jeonse prices are currently giving a much cleaner recovery signal than apartment sale prices.
The latest Korea Real Estate Board reading showed Daegu apartment jeonse prices rising 0.03% in one week, the sixth consecutive weekly increase.
That streak deserves attention because the sale market moved the other way during the same period.
Recent district numbers were also broad. Suseong-gu jeonse prices increased around 0.07%. Jung-gu, Seo-gu and Buk-gu rose too, while the other districts were mostly slightly positive.
Earlier in the summer, Suseong-gu had already built a double-digit run of consecutive weekly jeonse gains. Dalseong-gun's run had lasted even longer.
This gives us a useful look at actual housing demand without relying on investors predicting where prices will go.
Tenants need somewhere to live today. When rents start rising while thousands of new apartments are still being absorbed, it suggests the balance between available homes and households is tightening.
Daegu experienced the opposite during the crash. Huge completion volumes pushed both sale and jeonse prices lower.
Now completions are collapsing while jeonse is rising.
If that continues for another several months, the argument that Daegu still has far too many apartments will become increasingly difficult to defend.
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Does Daegu's shrinking population ruin the bottom story?
Daegu's shrinking population is a genuine long-term problem for apartment prices, but the city's number of households is still rising, so housing demand is declining much more slowly than the population headline suggests.
Daegu Policy Institute data put the city's registered population at roughly 2.35 million at the end of 2025, down around 10,600 people, or 0.4%, in one year.
Nobody should ignore that trend.
A city losing residents will have a harder time generating sustained housing demand than Seoul or a fast-growing satellite city.
But people do not buy one apartment per fixed number of residents. Households buy and rent apartments.
Daegu added roughly 8,400 households over the same period, taking the total to around 1.11 million. Average household size fell from about 2.14 to 2.12 people, while one- and two-person households represented roughly two-thirds of the city.
That produces a strange but important situation: Daegu can lose people and still require more housing units for a while.
There is a limit to that effect. Household fragmentation cannot offset population decline forever, especially if younger residents continue moving elsewhere.
For this part of the cycle, though, the numbers tell us something simple. Daegu's demographic problem is too slow-moving to cancel out the significance of a supply drop from tens of thousands of annual completions to a few thousand.
| Demographic measure | Recent level | Direction | Impact on apartments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered population | ~2.35 million | Falling | Negative |
| Annual population change | ~-10,600 | Falling | Negative |
| Households | ~1.11 million | Rising | Positive for unit demand |
| Annual household change | ~+8,400 | Rising | Positive |
| Average household size | ~2.12 | Falling | More homes per resident |
| 1-2 person households | ~67% | High | Supports smaller households |
Could Daegu developers flood the market with apartments again?
Daegu still has enough approved projects to create another oversupply cycle eventually, but developers currently have very little reason to repeat what just happened.
More than 50,000 homes have reportedly received project approval beyond the near-term scheduled supply.
That number looks frightening until we ask how many developers are actually willing to launch them.
Recent behavior has been extremely cautious.
Only seven projects totaling roughly 2,644 homes including association allocations came to market during 2025, according to local industry data. Most struggled during initial sales. Beomeo I-Park Phase 2 was the obvious exception, reportedly drawing a first-round competition ratio around 75 to 1.
At the same time, average Daegu presale prices excluding the exceptionally expensive Anard Beomeo project reached roughly ₩24.86 million per 3.3㎡, about 22% higher than one year earlier. Rising construction costs make it difficult for developers to offer genuinely cheap new apartments even when resale prices are weak.
So developers face an unpleasant choice: launch expensive homes into a selective market or delay the project.
Many are choosing to wait.
July provides a good current example. Daegu recorded no new presale supply during the month even though housing permits jumped to 2,743 units from only 449 a year earlier.
Permits can therefore rise long before physical apartments hit the market.
We would keep watching that approved pipeline, especially once sale prices improve. For now, the supply risk sits several years away rather than directly on top of today's market.
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Could Daegu apartment prices still crash again?
A second major Daegu apartment crash looks unlikely without a fresh economic or credit shock.
There are still ways prices could fall.
Mortgage rates could remain painfully high. South Korea could enter a deeper slowdown. Local employment could weaken. Developers holding completed unsold apartments could offer larger discounts. And Dalseo-gu or other oversupplied areas could drag the citywide index lower for longer than expected.
But repeating the previous collapse would require fighting against a radically smaller supply pipeline.
During the original downturn, Daegu had rising interest rates, weak transactions, enormous construction completions and nearly 14,000 unsold homes arriving together.
Today unsold housing is around 4,300. The next two years contain only a few thousand scheduled completions under the latest Real Estate Board and Real Estate R114 estimate. Jeonse prices have been rising for weeks. Some districts are already recording sustained sale-price gains.
The remaining bearish forces are real, but they are weaker than the group of forces that created the crash.
Our base case therefore has Daegu moving sideways with local pockets of further decline rather than experiencing another double-digit citywide leg down.
A new recession or credit event could obviously change that. Ordinary continuation of the existing cycle probably will not.
What would prove that Daegu apartment prices have actually bottomed?
We would call the Daegu apartment bottom with much more confidence once sale prices stay around zero or higher for several months while completed unsold inventory keeps falling.
The city is close on several tests already.
Total unsold housing has been cut by about 69% from its peak. The latest monthly reading resumed its decline. Completed unsold apartments also fell again. Jeonse prices have risen for six straight weeks. The future completion pipeline is extraordinarily small.
Sale prices remain the missing piece.
Daegu managed one weekly increase after 132 weeks, later reached 0.00%, then returned to small declines. That sequence shows resistance to further falls, although sellers have not yet gained enough power to sustain price increases.
We would also want to see Dalseo-gu improve. A citywide recovery will remain fragile while Daegu's biggest transaction market and biggest pool of unsold housing continues posting some of the largest weekly price drops.
Finally, transactions need to remain active without developers or homeowners constantly offering deeper discounts.
There is no magic percentage that confirms a housing bottom. But if sale prices flatten, jeonse keeps rising, completed inventory keeps clearing and the supply cliff becomes visible in actual available stock at the same time, waiting for further confirmation would mostly mean waiting until prices have already started rising.
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So, are Daegu apartment prices finally near the bottom?
Yes. Daegu apartment prices are very likely near the bottom now, even though the citywide index has probably not recorded its final negative week yet.
The strongest argument comes from what has changed underneath prices.
Daegu's unsold inventory has fallen from 13,987 homes to 4,278, roughly a 69% cleanup. Completed unsold homes have just declined again to 3,481. Apartment completions have fallen dramatically, and the newest joint estimate from Korea Real Estate Board and Real Estate R114 shows only 5,377 homes due from the second half of 2026 through the first half of 2028.
At the same time, Daegu jeonse prices have risen for six consecutive weeks.
Sale prices are still lagging. The latest weekly citywide reading was down 0.01%, marking a third consecutive decline, while Dalseo-gu fell around 0.07%. Those numbers prevent us from declaring that Daegu has already entered a broad upswing.
But the question in the title is whether prices are near the bottom, and on that narrower question the evidence has become quite convincing.
The huge construction wave is disappearing. Around seven-tenths of peak unsold inventory has already been absorbed. Rental prices are firming. Several districts have started posting repeated gains. The remaining declines are generally measured in hundredths of a percent per week rather than the much larger moves seen during the crash.
Daegu can easily spend a few more months wobbling around these levels. Dalseo-gu and weaker projects may fall further, and thousands of completed unsold homes still have to find buyers.
We would nevertheless put the city in the bottoming phase today.
For someone waiting specifically for another Daegu-wide collapse before buying, the evidence has moved against that bet. For someone expecting prices to surge immediately, the evidence is also too weak.
The more likely outcome is less dramatic: Daegu keeps clearing its remaining inventory, rents tighten first, stronger neighborhoods move earlier, and the citywide sale-price index gradually stops producing negative weeks.
That process already appears to be underway.
OUR METHODOLOGY
Whether Daegu apartment prices are "near the bottom" is not something one weekly price reading can answer cleanly. Instead of relying on market mood, anecdotes or a single headline index, we broke the question into the main dimensions that can show whether a housing downturn is genuinely losing force.
We looked separately at sale-price momentum, unsold inventory, completed unsold housing, future apartment completions, transaction activity, jeonse prices, district-level differences, demographics and developer behavior. We assessed each part on its own and then looked at whether the evidence was converging on the same conclusion.
We deliberately did not treat Daegu's first positive weekly reading after 132 weeks as proof that the bottom had passed. Short-term price movements were given more weight when they persisted, appeared across several districts or were supported by changes elsewhere in the market, particularly falling inventory, firmer rents and a much smaller completion pipeline.
We also separated current cyclical forces from longer-term structural risks. Unsold homes, apartment completions, transactions and jeonse conditions can materially change the balance of the current cycle, while population decline and approved but unlaunched projects matter over a longer horizon.
Where different datasets use different time periods or project coverage, we use them to establish direction and scale rather than force them into one supposedly precise series. This is particularly relevant for estimates of future apartment completions, where earlier local forecasts and the newer Korea Real Estate Board and Real Estate R114 estimate cover different periods but point to the same sharp reduction in supply.
We also looked below the Daegu-wide average whenever district data showed meaningful divergence. Jung-gu, Dalseo-gu, Suseong-gu and Dalseong-gun are not reaching the end of the adjustment at exactly the same time, so a citywide index on its own can hide important local turning points.
Finally, we do not define the bottom as successfully identifying the exact lowest weekly price print. Our test is whether several independent pieces of evidence show that the forces pushing prices lower have weakened enough for the remaining downside to become smaller and more localized.
Key sources used for this analysis include Korea Real Estate Board's latest weekly apartment-price release, its June 2026 release covering Daegu's return to weekly price growth, Yonhap's contemporaneous report on the first increase after 132 weeks, and the Korea Real Estate Board and Real Estate R114 forward-completion estimate.
For inventory and construction conditions, we relied on MOLIT's July 2026 housing statistics, the preceding June 2026 release, MOLIT's official unsold-housing statistical series, and Daegu Metropolitan Government's record of the 2023 oversupply peak.
Transaction analysis was anchored to the MOLIT Real Transaction Price Disclosure System. Demographic context came from Daegu Policy Institute's population and household data, while the severity of the earlier downturn was cross-checked against Korea Real Estate Board's historical housing-price releases.
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