Seoulscapade

(Click for a larger view)

After numerous delays and the tediously long wait, trucks and earth moving equipment finally entered onto the Hanjin site this week. It’s all go, finally, with the estimated finish date for our new apartment being October, 2010.

The layout above is the very latest. The light blue buildings will have apartments of 32 pyeong, and so we’ll end up in one of those. I hope it will be in the south-west of the complex.

Those orange buildings along the north perimeter will be right next to the Shinwon complex, which is being built at the same time. Shinwon will consist of four tall buildings, taller than the Hanjin buildings, so they’ll tower over the expensive Hanjin apartments. People won’t be happy about that.

To get an idea of where it’s going to fit, here is a satellite image of the area. The white cross is about at the centre. Where the road ends in the layout above, at the bottom right, is where it meets the main road you see running from the top to the bottom right in the image below. In other words, tilt the top layout 90 degrees left, then shrink and centre it here on the white cross, and you can get any idea of where things go.

In the next image below, you can see where the site is in relation to the larger Seoul area. It’s well located on a main route that goes over the river, past Yongsan, and on into the downtown area. At the very bottom and middle of the following image is where Seoul National University is located.

Here is one of the preliminary apartment designs. Like the apartment buildings themselves, the final look of the apartments has not be fixed. They are likely to change as owners’ ideas or objections are taken into account. It all seems to be a very elastic arrangement.

Here are the three apartment designs for the same floor area (in light blue on the complex site plan) relevant to us. We’ll end up in one of three floor spaces.

I quite like the idea of plenty of balcony space. And on the other corner of other buildings there will probably be an apartment like this, or else like this but adjoining another of the same kind:

I like this style because you don’t have any common walls with neighbors, although according to the complex plan, only a couple of buildings for this apartment size will have these single apartment structures. This last one below is for the other main building type, where thankfully the master bedroom does not have a common wall.

Other designs exist for smaller and larger apartment sizes, but I haven’t seen them and they don’t apply to us anyway.

Our money has been tied up in this project throughout the delays, or should I say invested. Now, it’ll be further invested for three more years. The problem with this scenario is that we haven’t been able see those funds grow in a term deposit or something. It feels like it’s just in a vault somewhere, although our purchase will dramatically appreciate, one would hope, in the coming years.

We are not alone in our aggravation at this. It’s costing all buyers money because everyone has to rent longer than anticipated, waiting for their homes to be built.

In addition, because so much time has passed, building materials are now more expensive than ever. This means that the surplus we have to pay has increased to around $100, 000 or 100,000,000 won. That’s another problem with buying apartments this way—the unknown, variable extras.

Another extra, the one calculated according to how many “features” residents want built in, such as special landscaping, a swimming pool, hasn’t been decided upon yet. All these extra costs will end up in the mortgage, and in turn, they’ll be added onto the value of the property, so we won’t loose out. It’s just that the costs are more than they would have been, had things started earlier.

But what a relief to finally see something happening!