Ethnic connections, foreign housing investment and locality: a case study of Seoul

A new trend in global cities has been the increasing volume of foreign capital flowing into property markets with cross-border housing investment becoming a focus for international migrants. However, how ethnicity plays out in the housing market, particularly for home ownership, along with global migration, has not been well explored in emerging economies despite the increase in human and capital mobility. The aim of this paper is to identify the main housing investors with respect to ethnic connections and to explore intra-urban spatial expressions of foreign housing investment using Seoul as a case study. The result reveals that knowledge of local circumstances, usually via previous residency or shared ethnicity, can be significantly strengthened via ethnic and/or family ties. Koreans living in high-income Western Anglophone countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have been the key source of inbound funds in Korea. Foreign housing investment has appeared in three key areas where different groups of foreign nationals and translational class have been concentrated.