Can Feminist Awakening Transcend the Asset Economy?

Millennial Women Going on ‘Property Visits’ in a Society of Real Estate Speculation

 

By Choi Si-hyun

Published: March 8, 2026

Translated by Se-young Kim

 

My first time participating in a real estate property visit was driven by my curiosity as an anthropologist. Since the housing price surge in 2021, the term "imjang" [property visit] has been flooding news media, YouTube, and entertainment programs alike. Unlike stocks, real estate has a physical substance. Imjang is the act of personally visiting the location of a property of interest to verify it with one's own eyes and gather information.[1] It could even be described as hands-on investment learning. Although it has been less than ten years since this term first appeared in public discourse, even those with little interest in real estate investment are now familiar with it. It was a sign that something was changing. I was curious to know what was actually happening during these visits.

 

Apartments as a Means of Class Reproduction and the ‘Capable Mom’…

I Expected that Millennial Women Would Be Different

I have been researching urban housing issues in Korea from a feminist perspective. As Korea’s compressed modernization and construction-oriented urban development intertwined, apartments transcended being mere living spaces. Where one lived—in which neighborhood or which apartment—became a matter of materializing a family's class position, and the responsibility for that choice was implicitly attributed to women. A ‘good’ apartment was proof of [a wife and mother being] a capable mom, an indicator demonstrating women’s capitalist productivity, and a tool for turning the ordinary income of a male head of household into an asset.

In a structure where the apartment as an asset, the apartment as a place for living, and the apartment as a means of class reproduction are intertwined as one organism, women's real estate practices were both an expression of speculative desire and a logic of domestic management that wove the family's future under tight conditions. However, the compulsion to pursue greater profit by constantly attempting to trade up—even while possessing a decent and stable house that others envy—for the sake of leaving something to the mother’s grown children, reveals both the moral justification and the structural contradictions of this practice.

I have been researching urban housing issues in Korea from a feminist perspective. Cover of my book How Real Estate Became a Woman's Job (by Choi Si-hyun, Changbi, 2021)

I expected that the Millennial generation would be different. I had an expectation that the conditions that drove Baby Boomer women into real estate—such as unstable careers (or sometimes even inability to enter the job market), family-oriented commitment, and the pressure for class reproduction through children—would operate differently for their children, the Millennials. Because the latter were strongly touched by feminism.

These are women who wish to place their careers at the center of their lives rather than living as someone's mother or wife, women who postpone or reject patriarchal heterosexual marriage, and even women who declare themselves the 4Bs (non-marriage, non-dating, non-childbearing, non-sexual). To them, neither children to pass down the wealth to nor the fenced-in ‘normal family’ as something to be protected at all costs holds much significance. If so, wouldn't the reason to stake one's life on an expensive apartment also change? However, I was mistaken about that.

Young Women Whom I met at Real Estate Property Visits

What choices are Millennial women, who have come of age while going through the reboot of feminism, actually facing, and what are their considerations? Through participant observation in about 10 property visits organized by an Internet community last year, I was able to gain some understanding of clues to the answer.

In every instance, more than half of the participants were young women. Spanning from their early 20s to late 30s, most appeared to be office workers. They came out for property visits by carving out time from their evenings after work or sacrificing a half-day of their weekends. Since property visits involve traveling a significant distance and gathering a substantial amount of information within a few hours, they demand physical stamina, a keen curiosity about real estate, and acute observation skills. Once the visit begins, participants quickly take notes on their phones about what they see and hear, and investigate the areas of interest while taking photos. The participants ultimately seek to verify one thing:

“Just how high is the value of this region, this neighborhood, and this apartment complex?”

To make such an assessment, comprehensive information and calculations are required. One must consider what kind of jobs the residents hold, whether commercial and educational districts are stably established, people's attire and facial expressions, the age range of passersby, the region's past, and what can be predicted five or ten years from now, and even the availability of parking spaces, how well recycling facilities are being maintained, recreational sports facilities, and noise levels.

Since elements that cannot be captured solely by quantifiable price data are constantly visible on-site, it requires significant concentration, time, and a certain degree of intuitive interpretation. Participants exchanged their observations to learn the signs of so-called "good neighborhoods" and, at times, even modified their existing expectations. In this way, a property visit transcends simple property scouting and functions like a field seminar—a forum for collective interpretation regarding future possibilities and a means of coordinating judgments.

Through a few rounds of participant observation, I came to understand that this activity goes beyond the practical act of seeking investment opportunities; it is a process in which the younger generation barely manages to construct a sense and language of optimism amidst an uncertain asset economy.

View of the apartment complex seen during a property visit. (Photo provided by Choi Si-hyun)

 

 A Room of One’s Own and Women’s Economic Independence

 

Unlike other investments, real estate requires a substantial amount of seed money. Housing prices in the Seoul metropolitan area, in particular, have long since formed market rates that are unrelated to the wage levels of ordinary people. It is self-evident that to own a small apartment in one's own name, one needs not only substantial seed money but also a stable income and job rank that allow one to take out a mortgage, as well as a secure position that enables long-term repayment. Therefore, access to this cannot be granted equally. It is impossible for everyone gathered at a property visit to be standing on the same starting line.

First, it must be noted that, as many statistics already demonstrate, Korea's labor market is deeply gendered. According to a 2025 announcement by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, an analysis of 2,980 companies that disclosed gender wage data revealed that the average yearly wage of male employees was 97.8 million won, while the average yearly wage of female employees was 67.73 million won; consequently, the gender wage gap reached 30.7%, an increase of 4.4% from the previous year. The gap widened further in industries with a large workforce, such as manufacturing, information and communications, and finance and insurance.

The proportion of women in non-regular employment is significantly higher than that of men, and wage gaps persist stubbornly even within the same occupation type and rank. In this dual-structured labor market, women are often placed on the periphery rather than the core. Conditions such as steady income growth in stable regular employment, maintaining a quality of life, and the reliable income history required for mortgage loan screening are all given in a way that disadvantages many women from the outset. The situation is not much different even if a woman fights her way into a professional field. According to a 2022 survey by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the average annual wage for male doctors was 248.25 million won, while that for female doctors was 172.87 million won, amounting to only about 69.6% of the male figure.

At this point, a question that has long held us captive is invoked. Over a century ago, in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf stated that for a woman to have the freedom to write, she needed an annual income of 500 pounds and a "room of her own." Painfully accepting that the intellectual freedom she desired was inevitably dependent on material things, Woolf argued that women had to achieve economic independence by any means necessary to freely engage in their own activities.

Woolf’s words remain true even today. In today’s urban space, owning an apartment in one’s own name would be a modern version of the ‘room’ Woolf referred to. To be able to stay in my own home indefinitely, without relying on someone else’s goodwill, is not merely a matter of possession, but of ontological security. The fact that I have a home is the primary material basis that protects me from and, at times, liberates me from the many things I do not want.

Since economic dependence leads to subjection of life, economic independence is the language of survival for women who wish to live the life they want, in their own way. Here, economic independence is not merely a matter of a bank balance that can be drawn on at any time but is equated with a structure of choice that allows one to reconstruct life in the manner desired. If we attain the "economic freedom" frequently invoked in discourse on personal finance management, we will no longer have to endure sexist workplaces and abusive bosses, cater to the whims of arrogant landlords, helplessly maintain unwanted relationships, or suppress our desires under the financial support of others. The perception that all of this is predicated on economic freedom operates deeply within the feminist self.

Therefore, immersion in real estate investment, which can resolve housing insecurity and even yield capital gains, may be the result of a feminist awakening that was hard earned through confronting the pain of structures of gender inequality.

Structural Inequality That Meritocracy Erases

However, the complex questions begin right here. The power that enabled Woolf to have a room of her own and speak the truth stemmed from an inheritance left by her aunt. The irony that a woman who advocated for liberation through economic independence wrote her work using inherited money as a stepping stone—since she could not realize it through labor alone—is difficult to view merely as a contradiction in her personal history. It raises the question of for whom and in what manner "economic freedom" is possible, and remains valid in today's context. As Woolf herself acknowledged, a material foundation was a condition that made her self-reflection possible, but for some, it is a starting line already given, while for others, it is something that is unreachable from the very beginning.

Those who have been lucky enough to reach safety in the unreasonable dual labor market—namely, those with stable regular jobs or high-income professional careers—or those who can secure loans using parental gifts or family assets as collateral may find it slightly easier to declare "economic freedom" in the name of feminism. If a steady income history and creditworthiness to pass loan screenings are prerequisites for entering the real estate market, these prerequisites are not given with equal weight from the outset to women, who have been relegated to the periphery of this dual labor market. For some, "economic freedom" is a goal that can be gradually reached by diligent legwork and watching YouTube lectures, but for others, it is an unequal game where the starting line is drawn at a different location from the very beginning.

Nancy Fraser has confronted this point head-on. According to Fraser, the critique of the patriarchal structures that feminism has long fought against began at some point to dangerously resonate with the direction demanded by neoliberalism. (Interview with the international sociology journal Global Dialogue, “Feminism in Neoliberal Times”, 2018) It is undeniable that an important goal feminism has pursued is that women should compete in the market on equal footing with men and receive what they deserve based on their abilities. However, the moment this is reduced to meritocratic equality, structural inequality is easily translated as a lack of individual effort or a failure to understand the world.

Women who have barely managed to secure their own path within speculative capitalism by purchasing apartments and becoming multi-home owners who also collect rent can achieve a certain degree of autonomy in the patriarchal world. However, that path rests upon someone else's housing costs. Someone else continues to move from one rented apartment to another, shouldering the instability of life. To borrow Fraser's expression, while there are a minority of women who break the glass ceiling and escape the structure, the majority of women must clean up the shards of that broken glass in the basement.

The reason this holds even more acute significance in the real estate market is that housing with a ‘good address’ in a major city is a highly sought-after yet extremely scarce resource. Unlike stocks or currency, which can be printed as needed, housing cannot escape the duality of being both a human dwelling and a core commodity of the asset economy. Therefore, when success in the asset market is interpreted as the fruit of feminist awakening, we cannot help but question how structurally disproportionately that potential is distributed.

Proof photo taken when participating in a property visit (Provided by: Choi Si-hyun)

When the ‘Good Address’ I Obtained is Based on Someone Else’s Rising Housing Costs

The story of Gina (pseudonym), a 36-year-old employee at a large corporation, illustrates this complexity well. Gina, who introduced herself as an ordinary office worker, was someone who traveled abroad once or twice a year and actively enjoyed hobbies like scuba diving. During the housing price surge in 2021, though, she was shocked to witness colleagues she considered similar to herself facing completely different life prospects depending on whether they owned a home, and from then on, she began studying real estate.

The belief that one could generate profits by dedicating one’s time to learning investments just as one earns a salary for the work done at a job became a reality faster than expected. Within three years, she acquired two apartments through gap investing[2]. For Gina, who does not wish to marry, have children, or raise children, these assets have become a foundation that allows her to be optimistic about the future, as well as a driving force in life that carries more weight than a career at a stable job. Even now, she goes on property visits on weekends to plan her next investment.

When she tells me that the vague anxiety she had about the future as a single woman has now disappeared, it sounds quite convincing. What Gina obtained through real estate investment was not merely assets, but control over her own life. In an unpredictable labor market and an insufficient social welfare system, the strategy of making money work for itself holds its own rationality. Training oneself as an investor to acquire coveted real estate may well be the most recognized achievement in today's capitalist society.

However, for the initiative seized by one person in this game to hold substantial value, the housing costs of another must rise. And when considering who is the first and most severely affected by that upward pressure, it is difficult to ignore the fact that her liberation relies, to some extent, on the unjust conditions of others who are structurally more vulnerable.

The desire to secure housing stability and build secure assets, driven more desperately by being a woman, remains legitimate. Given the structural disadvantages accumulated by patriarchal structures and a labor market unfavorable to women, women's aspiration to become leading actors in the asset market is not only a strategic response to long-standing exclusion but also an expression of their will to design their own lives. To reduce this desire to mere speculative greed or to morally condemn it amounts to erasing the conditions that the structure has imposed upon the individual.

However, the legitimacy of desire does not exempt one from questions regarding the manner in which it is realized and the relationships it creates. How can one pursue housing stability and economic independence while simultaneously confronting and minimizing the complicit relationship with the structures of speculative asset accumulation? Before being a matter of individual choice, this is a shared question regarding how feminism will confront the asset economy.

How Will Feminism Confront the Asset Economy?

Feminism does not promise a certain single narrative of liberation. It is closer to a political practice that constantly renews itself by repeatedly questioning whose liberation is possible under what conditions, and whether that freedom reinforces further exclusion or inequality.

The reality faced by young women in Korea today, standing before the asset economy, is also situated on this landscape of tension. The choice to secure independence through assets can be an extremely rational and clever survival strategy. However, when this process fuels expectations and competition for the upward trend of the real estate market, and becomes part of a profit structure premised on the housing insecurity of others, we cannot help but ask how the language of freedom and security redraws class boundaries.

At the same time, we must question both the sense of liberation offered by the language of "economic freedom" and its narrowness. In current usage, "economic freedom" generally refers to a state of escaping labor through asset income and being able to break away from unwanted relationships or conditions at any time. It is an intensely powerful and alluring prospect. However, if we do not sufficiently examine where that allure leads us, freedom ends up becoming yet another norm. The ability to manage anxiety and stabilize the future through assets is undoubtedly an important power. However, when it is imagined as the sole safety net of life, we end up internalizing the logic of individual survival while erasing our complexly intertwined relationships of interdependence.

How can ‘economic freedom’ be re-positioned within social relations? Imagining alternative forms of safety nets that sustain each other’s lives, even if it means slightly slowing down the pace of ownership and accumulation; fairly expanding the conditions for co-existence rather than focusing on individual escape possibilities—at this point, what feminism can do is to reflectively shake up the direction of desire. It is to willingly embrace the uncomfortable question of whether the freedom I pursue comes into existence while leaving someone else outside that possibility. And it is to imagine a world where everyone’s own private room does not need to be predicated on someone else’s anxiety. This is the possibility I refuse to let go of in the face of the question, “Can feminist awakening transcend the asset economy?”

About the Author: Choi Si-hyun. Feminist cultural researcher. She is a research professor at Yonsei University’s Institute of Korean Studies, and lectures at Yonsei and Duksung Women's University. She researches family and urban space in Korean society from the perspectives of gender and class.

*Original article: https://www.ildaro.com/10405

[1] Editor’s note: People often do this in a small group gathered for this purpose. Sometimes they will visit an actual unit that is available, and sometimes they just look at an apartment complex and the surrounding neighborhood. They are generally not intending to buy and move into a unit immediately; instead, the visits are about gathering information about options for a home in the future or for real estate investing.

[2] Editor’s note: A Korea JoongAng Daily article explains “gap investing” like this: “If the price of a unit is, say, 400 million won and the tenant has paid 350 million won in jeonse, an investor can offer to buy the home from the landlord by paying just 50 million won. The investor still takes on the burden of returning the 350 million won jeonse deposit when the tenant moves out, but if the apartment price skyrockets in that time, the investor can still make a profit.”