Authorities hold meeting to check progress in implementing measures to seek a soft-landing in the real estate PF marketJun 05, 2024

The Financial Services Commission held a meeting with related authorities and industry groups on June 5 to review progress in the implementation of various measures intended to stabilize the real estate project finance market. For the application of upgraded standards to evaluate financial viability of real estate development projects, financial industry groups will make relevant changes to their best practice guidelines and internal rules to be able to perform evaluation on development projects based on the upgraded standards and submit results to the Financial Supervisory Service until the end of July this year. At the meeting, participants discussed various stabilization efforts made by individual financial sectors. For instance, savings banks are working to set up an additional fund worth more than KRW460 billion, while the specialized credit finance sector has set up another fund worth about KRW260 billion. Meanwhile, the delinquency rate on real estate project finance loans as of end-March 2024 rose to 3.55 percent (up 0.85 percentage points) from 2.70 percent at end-December 2023. Authorities saw that the rise in delinquency rate was attributable to the strengthening of risk management by financial companies, and that the relatively high delinquency rates exhibited by securities firms and savings banks were also manageable considering high levels of capital ratios and reserves set aside in these sectors.