A Hypothetical Question
Incheon LK Royal Golf Club.
This was no place just anyone could walk into. Operated under a strict VIP membership system, it was an ultra-luxury golf course open only to those who had passed LK's exacting screening.
Early morning.
Against a vista that took in the sea at a single glance, a man and a woman were enjoying a leisurely round of golf.
Kang Bitna, and her father—Kang Taeju, Vice Chairman of the LK Group.
Kang Taeju stood nearly a hundred ninety centimeters tall, with broad, powerful shoulders and a refined bearing. Anyone looking at him would have said noble blood practically poured off him.
The two of them walked side by side toward the next hole. It was the perfect stretch for taking in the scenery and trading secrets or idle talk—possible only because every tee time after theirs had been cleared.
The caddie followed at a respectful distance.
"Bitna, I think it's about time you told me."
"Told you what?"
Kang Taeju asked first, lightly. Kang Bitna looked at him with a puzzled expression, as if she had no idea what he meant.
"There has to be a reason you insisted on playing golf this early. You're not the type to invest time just to humor your father."
"Why are you being like that? I'm not some shallow materialist."
When Bitna answered curtly, Kang Taeju spoke with a calm face.
"You know, of everyone in the world, the person I trust least after your grandfather is you."
"Grandfather would be pretty hurt if he heard that."
"I already told him."
"Hmm… It's nice being back after so long. The view's beautiful, too."
Momentarily at a loss for words, Kang Bitna turned toward the western sea for no particular reason and changed the subject.
Kang Taeju didn't press further. Instead, he casually steered the conversation toward the company.
"By the way, you're lasting quite a while at the office this time. I wonder what wind blew through you."
"What wind."
Bitna tossed the words out flatly.
Then Kang Taeju raised his voice slightly, as if something had just occurred to him.
"Ah—I heard about it. Your team pulled off something huge, didn't they? The Han Yojung contract."
"It was not huge. How is that huge? We signed one celebrity. It's just one of the things we were supposed to do."
Kang Bitna snapped back with a straight face, but Kang Taeju took it the opposite way.
"Well, look at that. My daughter's even humble now. Though I hear Han Yojung's side put up a strange condition?"
"What? What condition?"
For an instant, Kang Bitna's eyes flickered—then settled again.
"Oh, you didn't know?"
Unaware, Kang Taeju kept going.
"They demanded that one regular employee be brought onto the project no matter what. Said they signed the contract because of him. Who was it again—that employee who blew up on the internet last time?"
"Ah. Yes. He's on our team. That employee."
Only then did Kang Bitna grasp the full picture. She didn't let it show, but her mood turned oddly unsettled.
And so a sudden curiosity rose in her.
"I saw the video too. He was really something."
"Just luck, Dad. But there's something I've been wondering about."
"Hmm? What could my daughter possibly be curious about?"
Kang Taeju leaned in with interest.
His daughter almost never asked about anything, so the content itself was intensely intriguing.
"Hypothetically. Really, just hypothetically. If I wanted to date an ordinary person—would you allow it?"
"An ordinary person? What kind of ordinary person?"
"I don't know. Just… some regular office worker?"
When Kang Bitna said it boldly, Kang Taeju tilted his head.
"What is this? A girl who never showed the slightest interest in men suddenly asking something that absurd?"
"I said hypothetically. What would you do?"
Kang Bitna pressed him for an answer.
"Well. If my daughter is happy, I don't care. Your mother and I met that way, after all. But do you think your grandfather would just sit back and watch?"
"Then we date in secret!"
"You really think that would work? Honestly?"
Kang Taeju deliberately hardened his expression and set the mood.
"In this country, the only place your grandfather's eyes and ears don't reach is North Korea. If you dated a man like that, that man might quietly disappear."
"Come on. No way."
"'No way' is exactly how people get caught."
Kang Taeju spoke with a meaningful look, then stepped up to his ball lying on the fairway. With a perfectly stable stance, he sent a drive flying.
Watching him, Kang Bitna made a faintly uneasy face—then spun on her heel.
"…I'm leaving."
"Huh!? Now? We're only on the third hole!! Bitna! What did I do wrong? Why!??"
Kang Taeju scrambled after her.
I opened the window, and the morning air was crisp.
I had barely slept, yet somehow my mind was clearer than it had ever been.
The moment I looked out at the world beyond the glass, a feeling different from before settled over me.
Every building began to resolve into numbers.
Not visible to the eye, of course—only inside my head.
Did I spend too long buried in real estate books?
I shook my head hard and shut the window. The late-November wind was fiercer than expected.
With a warm cup of coffee, I sorted my thoughts.
I had wrestled with this for a long time.
There was always the option of renting a house or apartment—even an expensive one—and keeping the lump sum rolling in investments.
But monthly rent easily cleared a million won, and if I suddenly lost my ability and the investments failed, my life could freefall in an instant.
There was no guarantee investments would always succeed, either.
No matter how sharp I became, I couldn't stop natural disasters.
Bankruptcy, war, earthquakes, tsunamis, disease—plenty of famous investors had been ruined by forces of nature.
So I chose a slower but more stable path.
In the end, the answer is owner-occupied investment.
It was the obvious conclusion everyone reached, but nothing was more certain.
In an era overflowing with apartments, though, the eye for selection was everything.
Usually the core of real estate investment was older apartments near redevelopment zones or designated improvement districts.
Moving quickly into areas that hadn't yet drawn public attention but where quiet good news was already being prepared—living there while waiting for capital gains.
Of course, finding such places was hard, and the risks were real.
Development delayed or canceled. Or redevelopment already underway, with forced relocation looming.
It was difficult work.
If it were easy, everyone would have made a fortune in real estate.
But I was confident.
Confident I could pick the right property.
First, I planned to visit Gagok-dong in Jongno-gu.
There was an old complex there called The Hutton Apartments that best matched the criteria I had set.
Those criteria were not mere gut feeling.
More than ten real estate books. Actual investment cases dug up online. Policy analysis materials.
Dozens of inferred hypotheses fused into one pure, personal investment standard.
Explaining it would be far too broad and complex.
Transit access, location, price, redevelopment potential, neighborhood atmosphere, school districts, natural environment, national projects, hospitals—countless conditions interlocking organically into a single result.
I finished getting ready and left the house.
I had thought about calling a few real estate offices in the neighborhood first, but decided to go in person and walk the area myself.
After a subway ride and another twenty-odd minutes on foot, I arrived at the destination.
I confirmed it took twenty minutes to the station, and calculating the distance to the company put it at roughly a thirty-minute walk.
The location itself wasn't bad.
But The Hutton Apartments looked even more worn than I had expected.
The brick exterior carried every mark of the years. The parking lot was a semi-basement crammed wall to wall with cars. The ground was cracked, concrete broken in places.
I could sense people here and there, but the complex itself felt strongly dead.
The numbers rising in my head all pointed negative.
As expected, there was a gap between researching online and feeling a place in person.
Good thing I came myself.
I circled the apartment grounds once.
Then, suddenly, I noticed a residential neighborhood to the north of the complex.
Houses?
Right beside the apartment complex, yet the atmosphere was entirely different.
Alleys running along low walls. Neatly trimmed garden trees. Red-brick houses marked by time. Old, but strangely endearing scenery.
So it was a housing district…
I moved without thinking.
Only a single wall separated it from the apartment complex, but the feeling was completely different.
Unlike the dead apartments, this place felt unnaturally well-ordered.
Walking the streets, I rapidly observed building structures, alley widths, degrees of aging, the flow of people.
And soon, not instinct but logical inference rose in my mind.
Here. This housing district is more likely to be developed first than the apartments.
I sorted it out one by one in my head.
First, the probability of designation as an improvement zone looked high.
The aging was far worse than the apartments—houses at least thirty years old stood in rows.
Second, the residential roads were narrow, but expansion lines from urban planning were already drawn around them. That was likely groundwork for infrastructure expansion tied to redevelopment.
Third, remodeled single-family homes were scattered through the alleys here and there. Traces of residents who had moved in for actual living rather than outside demand. Quiet entry already underway.
The apartments… are already too late.
The Hutton Apartments still met my criteria, but they were too old, and their upside relative to the location was limited.
If redevelopment started, demolition and relocation could begin immediately, making actual residence inconvenient.
This housing district, by contrast, was moving quietly beneath the surface.
Secret acquisitions. Inflow of owner-occupier demand. Infrastructure already being prepared.
On top of that, the policy materials and news I had read, Seoul's urban improvement plans, all crossed in my mind and formed a single picture.
In my head, the value of these houses kept climbing.
Within ten years, this whole area will be completely overturned.
Of course, my conviction might not be the correct answer.
So I decided to stop by a nearby real estate office and dig up some information.
I came out onto the main road looking for an agency and was walking along the thoroughfare when raised voices carried from the terrace of a coffee shop right in front of me.
"Hey, this isn't even inside the shop—what does it matter if I smoke or not? Huh?"
"Sir… I'm sorry, but there are other customers on the terrace, and we'd appreciate if you could refrain from smoking…"
"Then why did you build a terrace in the first place? Isn't it for smoking? Who the hell are you to tell me to put it out!"
Two middle-aged men in suits and a female café employee came into view. One of the men was jabbing a finger—cigarette still in hand—at the employee and berating her.
At the next table sat customers with a stroller and a child. Everyone was reading the room, none of them daring to step in.
A no-smoking sign was clearly posted on the terrace.
"Fuck! You think customers are a joke? The coffee tastes like shit, and the only reason I even drink it is so I can smoke on the terrace! Huh?"
The man grew more agitated, bellowing at the top of his lungs. I watched the scene impassively as I reached the front of the café.
Ahead of me, two high school girls had been walking by. They stopped at the shouting middle-aged man and seemed to raise their phones to record video.
Unfortunately, the middle-aged man spotted the high school girls.
The situation so far. The positions of both sides. The coffee cups on the table. A man at the extreme edge of rage.
Something felt wrong.
In that instant, every hair on my body stood on end.
"Hey! What the hell are you? Put that phone down! Fuck! What are you shoving a camera at me for!!"
At last the man's fury peaked. He snatched a hot coffee cup from the table and hurled it straight toward the street.