The amount of land owned by foreigners in Seoul declined for the first time in four years, municipal officials said Wednesday.
Foreigners possessed 3,801,782 square meters of land in the capital as of the end of June, down by 0.57 percent or 21,625 square meters from 3,823,407
square meters recorded in March, the officials said.
It marked the first reduction of the total size of land under foreign ownership since the third quarter of 2006. The metropolitan government began
filing records of foreigners' land ownership in 2004.
The number of land transactions by foreigners was also down to 592 in the second quarter from the first quarter's 644.
By nationality, U.S. citizens had the largest amount of foreign-owned land with 2.23 million square meters, followed by those from other American countries, including Canada, with 545,306 square meters.
British, French and German nationals had a total of 138,650 square meters of land while Japanese owned 101,095 square meters and Chinese had 77,985 square meters.
Some 2 million square meters of the land owned by foreigners were for building houses while 777,635 square meters and 117,947 square meters were for commercial and industrial purposes, respectively.