Finding a Place to Live in 2023

On May 6, 2023, I found my first place to live alone in Korea. I’ve only sent a deposit at this point, but having a clear move-in date is a great comfort. I’ll be completing the full contract next week.

To get straight to the point: I’ve decided to live in a small apartment in Songpa-gu starting July 11. It’s a well-maintained large complex with plenty of everyday amenities, so I think it’ll be a very comfortable place to live.

I spent a long time going back and forth about whether to live alone at all. It was exhausting having to make decisions about areas of life I’d never thought deeply about before. At the same time, thinking about what kind of home I wanted to live in helped me understand myself much better — what kind of person I am and where I want to live.

Before the memories fade, I thought it would be a good idea to write down my worries and deliberations about finding a home, and how I ultimately made my decision — so I’m leaving it here in article form.

What Mattered Most to Me

Affordable Budget Range

When looking for a place, figuring out how much I could realistically pay was extremely important.

Normally when I buy things, I don’t start by thinking about a budget. It’s actually the opposite. If there’s something I want, I look up roughly how much it costs. Then I decide whether that price range is something I can manage. If it’s fine, I buy it. If it’s too expensive, I let it go. That has generally been my shopping habit — thinking about the item first, not the budget. Compromising to fit a budget was never really my style.

Looking for a place was completely different from how I’d bought things before. The first thing real estate agents asked when I called was, “What’s your budget?” It wasn’t easy to respond with, “I haven’t really thought about a budget… could you just show me some decent places?”

With housing, you have to think about the budget first.

I had absolutely no sense of what places cost, so I started by gathering information. I began with a general idea of what a typical one-room goes for, then looked at overall market prices on Naver Real Estate. I visited places one by one to get a feel for what different conditions cost. That gave me a sense of what price range the places I liked tended to fall into. I then communicated with agents based on that range, and things went much more smoothly from there.

Does It Recharge My Energy?

After deciding to live alone, the most important principle I set for myself was this: Do I want to come home to this place? Does being here make my energy rise?

Finding a place that actually felt like home was harder than I expected. In the process, I looked at various types of housing — officetels, co-living spaces, apartments, villas — but only a limited number gave me that feeling of home.

Officetels felt least like a home. Many are right on busy roads, and stepping out of the elevator onto the ground floor only to be met with a bleak cityscape wasn’t a great feeling. I came to realize how much I care about what surrounds my home and what I see the moment I step outside.

From this perspective, apartments were by far the best. Walking out my door or coming up from the parking garage to find lush greenery and flowing water put me in a genuinely good mood. Looking out my window at a peaceful apartment complex gave me a quiet sense of happiness. Strolling across a grass lawn in the sunlight made me feel pleasantly drowsy — like I was truly resting.

Is It Quiet?

I’m very sensitive to noise and pay a lot of attention to the sounds I hear at home. A dog barking outside during the day is enough to break my concentration. The sound of garbage trucks collecting waste at night is hard to bear. In terms of noise between floors, at the apartment complex I used to live in — I’ll call it X — a child upstairs practiced piano every weekend, and it caused me considerable stress. So this time around, I focused on places that were likely to have minimal noise.

I tried to avoid places right in the middle of commercial areas. The sound of buses running from early morning or the roar of sports cars on main roads felt like it would wear me down.

Floor noise was genuinely hard to assess. People told me that in Korean multi-unit housing, it’s basically a lottery. So I focused on places that were at least built with sturdier construction. A mentor I met at AC2, who is just as sensitive to noise as I am, said that despite trying incredibly hard to find a quiet place, the apartment she ended up in still had floor noise. After hearing that, I decided not to spend too much energy on something that ultimately comes down to luck.

Is It a Two-Room Layout?

Whether a place was a one-room or a two-room made a big difference in how it felt. Many of the one-room places I saw were a single open space, which felt more like somewhere to sleep rather than an actual home. On the other hand, separating the sleeping area from the eating and working area was what made it feel like a real home. So at some point I started focusing on layouts where the living room and bedroom were separate.

Among the places I visited, one called Seocho Rision was the most tempting from this angle. The apartment itself was genuinely spacious and affordable. Parking was easy too, so I really agonized over whether to go for it. But the space was one large, undivided rectangle — it felt less like a cozy home and more like a large lecture room or conference room. Everything else was fine, but the layout was disappointing enough that I ended up passing on it.

Is Parking Convenient?

I drive regularly, weekdays and weekends alike. I drive to and from work, and I drive to nice cafés on the outskirts on weekends. I genuinely believe that having a car dramatically changes how freely I can move around. So how convenient the parking was mattered a great deal to me.

Officetels generally seemed to have inconvenient parking. Many charge a separate parking fee, and quite a few only allocate 0.5 spaces per unit, meaning if you come home late at night, there may be no spots left. Even at the X apartment complex where I lived for about ten years, and at the R complex where I currently live, coming home after 11 p.m. often means parking stress due to limited spaces. So I knew I needed to focus on places with relatively easy parking.

Mechanical parking systems aren’t terrible, but since they take time to put the car in and get it out, I generally tried to look for places with conventional self-parking.

Distance to the Office

Living close to work is extremely important to me. I want to minimize the time I spend on the road or on the subway every day. Above all, my current situation at the R complex is exceptionally convenient — even in traffic it’s 15 minutes to work, and on a clear day just 5 minutes. I have almost no commute stress, and it’s easy to put in longer hours when needed while still having plenty of time left to rest.

I sometimes wonder whether I could make better use of time on public transit, but in my experience, attempts to do something productive on a commute have mostly failed. The only thing I’ve ever succeeded at is memorizing English vocabulary — and 15 minutes is enough to get through them. So ideally, I wanted a place no more than 10 to 15 minutes from the office.

The Route to Work

The experience I most want to avoid is weaving through narrow back alleys or staring blankly ahead in a traffic jam. If someone gave me the choice between driving for an hour on an open highway or driving for thirty minutes through gridlocked side streets, I would choose the former without hesitation.

So I focused on finding places where I could stick to main roads as much as possible on the way to Yeoksam Station, where my office is.

When visiting potential places, I tried to drive there when I could and check out the driving environment around the area. On the way back, I’d pass by the office so I could get at least a rough sense of what driving that route during rush hour might feel like.

Public Transportation Access

Even though I mostly drive, public transportation access turned out to matter more than I expected. There are more situations that call for transit than you’d think — when drinking, when the entire city’s roads are clogged. I also tend to prefer taking public transit when visiting places within Seoul, since finding parking is such a hassle.

The X apartment I used to live in had excellent public transportation access. Lines 3, 7, and 9 were all nearby, and there were plenty of bus stops. It was so easy to get around by transit that I took the bus or subway all the time. If I ever needed to get home after a night of drinking, I barely had to think about how to manage it.

By contrast, my current R apartment has poor transit access. Technically the station is about a 10-minute walk, but it’s entirely uphill. Taking public transit means thinking about climbing that hill first. As a result, I go out much less often. People are shaped by their environment — if I’m considering heading out but then remember the hill, I tend to give up. Unless I’m really motivated, I usually end up staying home.

The contrast between the two experiences was so stark that I came to truly appreciate how much transit access matters. So I tried to find a place where I could reach a subway station on flat ground within 5 to 10 minutes on foot.

Lease Duration

As I continued to think about my career direction, I began to realize I might not be in Korea two years from now. Standard lease terms in Korea are two years, and with my future location uncertain, this was a difficult issue. The thought of signing a contract and being committed to staying for two years felt like a lot of pressure.

As it turned out, however, even with a two-year lease, it’s often possible to leave early as long as you find a replacement tenant. Which makes sense — plenty of people find themselves in situations where they need to move out mid-lease, like being suddenly transferred to another city.

That said, if my rent was too high, it would be harder to find someone to take over the lease. So I tried to focus on places priced slightly below market rate to make it easier to leave if needed.

Places I Visited

Here are the places I visited while apartment hunting that were most useful in helping me make my decision.

Episode Gangnam, Seocho

I visited this one early on, with no particular knowledge or plan, when I had no idea what I was doing. It’s a co-living platform operated by SK, one of Korea’s major conglomerates.

The pricing is outrageously high — around 1.5 million won per month for a one-room. The variety of community services and large, clean common areas were nice touches, but I couldn’t help wondering whether it was really worth it.

Still, factoring in the premium community and the credibility of a major conglomerate, it gave me a rough benchmark: this is about the maximum price point for a place at this condition level.

Because it was run by a large company, touring was easy and booking was simple through the website, so there was minimal stress in the process of communicating to arrange a visit. It was a safe way to experience what looking at places actually felt like — something I found genuinely valuable.

Looking back now that I’ve found my current place, it seems almost absurdly expensive. But as a learning experience for someone who had never searched for a room before, it was useful.

Mangrove Sinchon

Mangrove Sinchon is a co-living platform similar to Episode. Unlike Episode, it’s run by a startup, so the rent is comparatively reasonable. Someone I met at a Memoire gathering happened to work there, so I toured mainly the common spaces.

The layout was noticeably better than Episode, and the pricing was much more sensible. If I had decided to go with a co-living building, I would have chosen Mangrove over Episode.

At the time, Mangrove didn’t have any vacancies anyway, and more importantly, the feeling it gave me was more “dormitory” than “home” — which was the bigger reason I chose not to move in. Looking back, it was still more expensive than simply renting a comparable officetel on the open market.

Samsung Hillstate Complex 1

After spending a lot of time looking at officetels and starting to wonder whether that was all there was, I stumbled across this place while scrolling through Hogangnono. Right in the middle of Gangnam was a small apartment. It was through this building that I first learned small apartments in the 10-square-meter range even existed in Seoul.

Come to think of it, I’d spent most of my life living in apartments, so the idea of living somewhere other than one felt deeply unfamiliar. That’s probably a big part of why officetels all seemed so underwhelming.

I also worried that since moving out on my own would already be a huge lifestyle change, adapting to a completely different type of housing on top of that might make things even harder. So when I found out small apartments like this existed, I went to take a look right away.

I still remember visiting that apartment for the first time. It was completely different from all the officetels I’d seen. Well-maintained plants, pleasant walking paths, easy parking, a sense of safety — and the weather happened to be nice that day, which made strolling through the complex feel especially good.

Getting to work was convenient too. Two turns along a wide main road and I was at Yeoksam Station. The commute was around 10 minutes, which felt just right.

In the end, I couldn’t close the deal — simply because I took too long. The one listing I really wanted was gone while I was still deliberating. Checking now, only pricier options remain, with jeonse prices about 100 million won higher than they were then.

Looking back, if I were to move into a place like this, I’d want a 14-pyeong unit over a 12-pyeong one, and specifically one with a partition wall installed. A 12-pyeong unit without room separation was essentially being used like a one-room, and it just didn’t feel like a proper home.

Seocho Rision

Having discovered how much I liked apartments, I visited Seocho Rision out of curiosity about what other small apartments might be like. It was a single-building complex that felt more like an officetel than an apartment.

It was a fairly old building, so the layout was extremely simple — one enormous rectangular room, undivided. It was bigger than the living room of most 40-pyeong apartments. The space felt blunt and uninteresting. There was a partition-style inner door in the middle, but it felt like an arbitrary way of splitting that huge room in two.

This place helped me realize that I prefer spaces with some complexity — distinct zones and a sense of defined areas. With just one large room sitting there alone, making use of the space would be difficult, and I felt like my life would become monotonous to match.

If I were to find a bright side, the apartment-style construction meant it had a generous balcony. And overall, for the price and location, the square footage was substantial. Like a mixed-use high-rise, parking late at night was also convenient.

But the layout was too plain, so I decided not to move in.

Yeoksan Villa

A villa in Yeoksamdong that a colleague introduced me to was, purely in terms of layout, the best option I came across. It had a proper living room and two separate bedrooms, making it easy to divide the space for different purposes. I could have distinct areas for sleeping, working, and eating. The natural light was good, and parking was in a dedicated conventional spot — convenient. There was a gate on the parking entrance that you had to open and close, but that was a minor inconvenience.

After mulling it over for a while, I decided not to move in. The main reason was the view when I stepped outside — just a dense cluster of villas. I didn’t think I’d ever feel the urge to rush home to that. There was also a restaurant alley right next door, and I worried it might get noisy at night.

Other Tips

Here are some things I learned from visiting various places that I thought were worth writing down.

First Impressions Matter

I learned that you can tell a lot about a place from your first impression.

You can pick up on more than you’d expect even before you walk through the door — the atmosphere around the building, the location, how safe the walk home feels. And immediately after stepping inside, you learn a lot more: how it feels in the light, whether it gets good sun, how clean it is, what the view is like.

Since these were the things that mattered to me, I found I could nearly decide whether to sign a lease based on first impressions alone. Everything else — the minor details — felt like things I could figure out (or learn to live with) as I went.

I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way, which is why I wanted to write it down. As someone looking for a place for the first time, I assumed I’d need to scrutinize everything closely. But the more places I saw, the more I realized first impressions carried most of the weight.

Contact Multiple Agencies

I learned that good listings aren’t shared across agencies, so even within the same neighborhood, it’s worth reaching out to several.

The range of listings each agency handles is apparently quite varied. First, agencies have listings they manage exclusively. Among those, the ones they expect to go quickly aren’t shared with other agencies or posted on Naver Real Estate — sometimes they’re only shown to clients who walk in the door. Since those listings sell themselves the moment someone sees them, there’s no need to advertise them online.

Properties that aren’t selling well through a single agency get passed around between agencies, so listings that multiple agencies are co-brokering tend to have slightly less desirable conditions. If the place were truly attractive, there’d be no need to bring other agencies in to help close the deal.

When two agencies co-broker a deal, the commission is split in half, so agencies strongly prefer to broker deals on their own.

For all these reasons, it was worth contacting multiple agencies in the same neighborhood. If you can make it clear what your budget is and signal that you’ll commit quickly if the right place comes along, agencies tend to call you right away when something good comes in. Moving fast when that happens is how you land the good ones.

Make Decisions Quickly

A place that looks good to you looks good to other people too — so you have to decide fast.

The apartment I ended up signing for had three or four people viewing it on the same day. On top of that, the agent told me that ten minutes after I said I’d send the deposit, someone else called asking to do the same. When a place has genuinely good terms, people line up to see it and move quickly to lock it down.

With that in mind, I think the most effective approach is to have a clear picture of what you’re looking for, and when the conditions are right, move all the way to a provisional contract as fast as possible.