Seoul Apartment Sales Fell 41% in a Month. Prices Barely Moved.

Between May and June 2026, the number of apartments sold in Seoul fell from 8,957 to 5,279. Every one of the city’s 25 districts declined. The median district saw sales drop 45%.

What did not happen is the part worth paying attention to. Across those same districts, the median price per square metre moved 1.2% lower — statistically indistinguishable from flat. Eleven districts edged up, thirteen edged down.

A market where volume collapses and prices hold is not a market in decline. It is a market that has stopped clearing. Our other housing briefs track the same transaction records month by month.

What the numbers show

Which districts froze hardest?

Splitting the 25 districts by price reveals the clearest pattern in the data.

The most expensive districts — Gangnam, Seocho, Songpa, Yongsan, Seongdong, Gangdong, Mapo, Dongjak — lost more than half their transaction volume. The cheapest — Dobong, Geumcheon, Gangbuk, Jungnang, Nowon, Jongno, Eunpyeong, Gwanak — lost about a third.

Gwangjin (-62.6%), Jongno (-61.2%) and Yongsan (-61.1%) fell hardest. Dobong (-16.7%), Yeongdeungpo (-18.6%) and Nowon (-23.1%) held up best.

Why did Gangnam and Seocho move in opposite directions?

Gangnam and Seocho normally track each other. In June they did not.

Seocho’s decline is the largest among districts with a reliable sample, and it is not a measurement artefact — 181 transactions is enough to trust, and the drop appears in both the headline median and the per-area figure. One month does not establish a trend, but it is the single clearest signal in this dataset.

Every district

Sorted by sales decline. The final column flags figures that should not be read as price movement — see the method note below.

Why use price per square metre instead of the median sale price?

The median sale price of an apartment answers a different question than most readers think. It reflects which apartments happened to sell, not what apartments are worth.

Guro makes the point. Its median sale price rose 24% between May and June. Its median price per square metre fell 18%. Both are correct. Larger units made up more of June’s smaller sample, which pushed the headline median up even as the price of a given amount of floor space fell.

Reporting “Guro apartment prices rose 24%” would have been wrong in the most ordinary way — by quoting a real number that answers the wrong question. Four districts show this pattern this month: Guro, Gangbuk, Gwanak and Gwangjin. They are flagged in the table.

Jongno carries a different warning. Its 36.8% per-square-metre jump is consistent across both measures, but rests on 33 transactions. At that sample size a handful of unusual sales moves the median. It is flagged as a small sample rather than reported as a price rise.

Why compare May and June when it is already August?

Korea gives sellers 30 days from contract to report a sale. Recent months therefore always look emptier than they were.

The effect is severe enough to invent stories that never happened. On the day this data was pulled, July and August both showed counts far below June’s — figures that would suggest a market in freefall. Both months were still being reported, and their totals climb every day as filings arrive. They are excluded from every comparison here.

May and June are the most recent pair that can be compared honestly.

Every figure here comes from the same transaction records the Ministry of Land publishes through its open data service. Seoul city runs a public lookup over the same records if you want to check an individual complex.

Reading Korean property figures

Three conventions catch out anyone arriving from another market.

Area is quoted in 평 (pyeong), not square metres. One pyeong is 3.3058 m². Listings and agents use pyeong; official records use square metres. This article uses square metres throughout.

Prices are quoted in 만원 (10,000 won) and 억 (100 million won). Gangnam’s June median of ₩2.74 billion appears in Korean listings as 27억 4천만원 — twenty-seven 억 plus four thousand 만원.

Exclusive area (전용면적) is what is measured. It excludes shared corridors, lobbies and parking. A unit advertised at “34평” typically has exclusive area near 84 m². Every per-square-metre figure here uses exclusive area.

What should a buyer do with this?

A frozen market and a falling market call for different responses.

Prices held because sellers withdrew rather than cut. If you are buying, the number that matters is not the district median but how long individual listings have been sitting — that is where a seller’s willingness to negotiate shows up first, and it does not appear in transaction data at all.

If you are a foreign buyer, note that most of Seoul has required a permit before signing since August 2025, with an obligation to occupy the property — we cover the rules in Can Foreigners Buy Property in Seoul?. That constraint applies regardless of what the market does.

Whether June was the start of something or a single quiet month will be answerable in late September, when July’s figures pass their reporting deadline. We will update this page then, and the revised figures will appear across our housing coverage.