Korea Housing Guarantee Corp. (HF) won the Top Public Service Award in the customer service sector as evaluated by the Korea Management Association Consulting Co. to assess the Korean industry’s service quality index for 2016, the company said on July 14.
The company won the top honor because its customer service has been improved a great deal, owing to extra training the company gave to its staff, exemplifying kindness, HF said. HF officials noted that the company wants to strengthen the standard for its public service and secure a customer management system, among others, to seek stable housing and happy retirement lives by more faithfully executing its duty as a financial partner.
Some 111 firms in 26 industries came under the evaluation team that toured Seoul and five large regional cities in the country, including the company’s branches in Incheon, Daejon, Daegu, Gwangju and Busan. They evaluated their services over 11 areas including kindness, knowledge on their responsible areas, customer service and positive attitude, among others.
HF said on July 8 that its subscriber numbers exceeded 5,300 in the first half of this year, the most subscribers in any first half in years, and an increase of 73.4 percent YoY. The figures come to about 82 percent of 6,485 in the number of new subscribers for all of last year, HF said.
Looking at the number of subscribers in the first half over the past five years, it came to 2,379 in 2012; 2,472 in 2014; and 5,317 in 2016, increasing continuously, while the number of new subscribers in the non-capital areas also consistently, with the number in 2012 coming to 548; 743 in 2014; and 1,759 in 2016. The number of new subscribers in the first half of 2016 rose 90 percent YoY.
The increase in the number of new subscribers in the first half of this year was due to the My House Pension, which is made up of three things the company introduced early in 2016.
HF officials said the number of subscribers rose sharply due to the understanding that the House Pension can be a very good means to take care of one’s retirement life. The number is likely to increase more sharply in the second half as the company is working on a plan to allow owners of an individual residence and officetel worth more than 900 million won to apply for membership of the Housing Pension Plan from the second half of this year.
The government reorganized KoMoCo to establish the Korea Housing Finance Corporation, a government funded organization. This was due to the rapid growth of the housing finance market since 2000, which was driven by short-term loans with low floating rates, rather than traditional long-term housing finance loans.
Short-term mortgage loans rapidly increased, which leads to instability in the housing finance market, in addition to not effectively supporting renters. In other words, short-term housing loans led to speculative housing demand relying upon the rise of housing price, creating instability in the housing market, as well as finance market. As a result, the government carefully considered long-term housing finance measures to address the inadequacies. In March 2004, the government established the Korea Housing Finance Corporation by merging KoMoCo, and introduced long term financing method of mortgage loans in order to develop a longterm housing finance market and stabilize the housing market. The role of the Korea Housing Finance Corporation (HF) was to change the housing finance market greatly by introducing a fixed rate mortgage loan system.
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