President Lee Jae Myung [Yonhap]
President Lee Jae Myung [Yonhap]

President Lee Jae Myung on Wednesday rebuffed a news article headlined "President's remark that home prices are 'plunging' only held true for Gangnam," calling it "fake news."

According to Yonhap, Lee said at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday that "actual transaction prices in major areas are falling at a surprising rate. There are areas where that is not the case, of course, but it is important to make sure the public has direct access to this accurate data."

In response to those remarks, the article reported that most parts of Seoul outside the three Gangnam-area districts — Gangnam-gu, Seocho-gu and Songpa-gu — were still seeing home prices rise, suggesting many residents had little reason to feel prices were falling.

Lee pushed back in a post on X, formerly Twitter, the same day. "The phrase 'actual transaction prices in major areas are falling at a surprising rate' and the phrase 'plunging' cannot mean the same thing," he wrote. "Even if they did, it would be wrong to present it as a direct quote with double quotation marks."

Lee also took issue with the headline's claim that his remarks "only held true for Gangnam," saying it implied everything he said about other areas was wrong. "It is clear that in my original remarks I was referring only to major areas of Seoul — namely Gangnam-gu, Seocho-gu and Songpa-gu," he said.

"Since I never said 'home prices across all of Seoul are plunging,' the claim that I only got Gangnam right is also fake news," he added.

Lee went on to urge readers to consult objective data, citing a sharp rise in listings across Seoul, a steep drop in transactions, a prolonged and significant decline in home prices in major Seoul areas including Gangnam, and increases in delinquency rates and the number of properties going to auction.

Lee then turned to a separate article on social media headlined "Is the president right that home prices have fallen? Seoul has risen for 90 consecutive weeks," saying the headline was written after he flagged the earlier inaccurate report and carried the implication that he had made a false claim. "What I actually said was: 'Home prices in major areas of Seoul are falling. Not in some areas,'" he said. "That is not a false statement."

He added that a remark about prices falling in some — not all — major areas "cannot be stripped of context and quoted in double quotation marks as 'home prices have fallen.'" He said it was "a fact that home prices in the three Gangnam-area districts have been falling sharply, by more than 0.3 percent per week, for more than ten weeks."

Lee called it "a second round of fake news" and said he hoped the outlet would issue a correction.

The headline of the article Lee criticized has since been revised to read: "Is the president right that 'home prices in major Seoul areas have fallen'?"


husn7@heraldcorp.com