6.8% of winners over past 5 years found ineligible after the fact

Bok Ki-wang calls for automated real-time verification to spare applicants hardship

Rep. Bok Ki-wang of the Democratic Party of Korea [provided by the lawmaker's office]
Rep. Bok Ki-wang of the Democratic Party of Korea [provided by the lawmaker's office]

The share of ineligible winners on Cheongnyak Home, the apartment subscription platform operated by the Korea Real Estate Board, has fallen by roughly half since the system began linking to the government's MyData network. But structural reliance on manual data entry has still left more than 54,000 applicants stripped of their winning spots over the past five years, according to data released Thursday.

Data submitted to Rep. Bok Ki-wang of the Democratic Party of Korea — who leads his party's side on the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee and represents Asan in South Chungcheong Province — show that 54,086 people, or 6.77 percent of the 798,476 winners in general pre-sale complexes between 2021 and August 2026, were later ruled ineligible by project operators and had their selections canceled.

That works out to roughly one in every 15 winners losing a hard-won chance at homeownership and facing restrictions on future subscriptions. The Korea Real Estate Board has spent about 2 billion won ($1.49 million) a year from its own budget — 11.1 billion won in total — managing Cheongnyak Home since taking over the system in February 2020.

Starting with resident registration records in August 2023, the board has progressively linked the platform to family-relationship certificates, entry and exit records, and single-parent household data. As a result, the annual ineligibility rate fell steadily from 8.85 percent (21,221 people) in 2021 to 4.01 percent (2,535 people) as of August this year.

Despite the expanding administrative data links, post-selection disqualifications continue. Over the past five years, the most common reason was miscalculation of the applicant's or spouse's period of not owning a home, accounting for 4,603 cases. That was followed by household members owning property (4,190 cases), selecting the wrong residential area (2,325 cases), the applicant personally owning property (1,597 cases), and errors in the number of dependents (1,140 cases). Critics note that most of these are simple arithmetic or data-entry mistakes that public database links could catch in advance.

The core problem, they say, is that the current system stops short of full automated verification, instead displaying MyData information on screen and leaving applicants to enter the figures themselves. The Korea Real Estate Board confirmed the setup, saying the system "currently guides applicants with real-time information pulled from MyData, which they then check and enter on their own."

System stability has also been flagged as an area needing improvement. When subscriptions opened for Dongtan Station Lotte Castle in July 2024, 128,000 users logged on simultaneously, pushing server load to 320 percent above capacity and triggering a system outage.

Meanwhile, the Korea Real Estate Board plans to complete integration of military service records by November and to extend the data links to property registry documents from 2027 onward. It also intends to add a function that cross-checks applicant entries against MyData records in real time, and to develop an AI-based eligibility diagnostic service in collaboration with proptech companies.

"The drop in the ineligibility rate to roughly half its previous level thanks to expanded MyData links is a meaningful achievement, but people are still suffering the consequences of canceled selections and frozen subscription accounts because of a complex system and the limits of manual entry," Bok said. "We need genuine service innovation that saves busy citizens time and effort. We must move beyond technical and institutional constraints, quickly complete a real-time cross-verification system that catches input errors at the application stage, and upgrade the pre-diagnosis service so that people can use a smart subscription environment with confidence."


bigroot@heraldcorp.com