Hometract: Streamlining Housing Access for Foreigners in South Korea Through a Comprehensive Mobile Solution; Systemic Exclusion in Korean Housing: Cultural and Policy Barriers for Foreign Residents

Foreign residents in South Korea face persistent challenges in navigating the housing market. Language barriers, unfamiliar legal structures, and discriminatory rental practices create systemic obstacles that prevent foreigners from accessing stable housing. This exclusion is not enforced by formal policy but is embedded in the infrastructure and social norms surrounding housing access. To address these challenges, I developed Hometract, a mobile application designed to connect foreign residents to real estate listings, enable remote contract signing, and minimize the need for in-person negotiation. Hometract integrates technologies such as AWS cloud infrastructure, secure OAuth authentication, the Naver Map API with clustering features, OCR-based identity verification, and WebSocket real-time chat. These technologies collectively empower foreign users to search for, review, and secure housing independently without requiring advanced Korean language skills or reliance on informal networks.
It is critical to consider the human and social dimensions of Hometract because housing is deeply infrastructural and culturally embedded. Without attention to social barriers, such as the invisibility of unwritten housing norms and systemic biases in rental practices, technological solutions risk becoming inaccessible to those they aim to help. By designing with these barriers in mind, Hometract does more than digitize listings; it reconfigures access to an infrastructure that traditionally favors insiders. The development and analysis of this project draw on Susan Leigh Star’s Infrastructure Framework, which emphasizes that infrastructures are relational, historically contingent, and often invisible to those embedded within them. Concepts such as reach and scope, learned as part of membership, and built on an installed base are especially relevant to understanding how South Korea’s housing infrastructure systematically disadvantages foreigners and why interventions must address these deeper structural dynamics.
To conduct my STS research, I used qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews with foreign residents from countries such as Vietnam, Ukraine, China, and the United States. Participants discussed their difficulties with initial housing searches, language barriers, hidden rental costs, and dependence on Korean-speaking friends or ethnic networks. Document analysis supplemented these findings, providing a broader context for infrastructural exclusion. Through this research, I found that technological barriers, legal complexities, and cultural unfamiliarity compound to create systemic exclusion. Many participants described housing in South Korea as opaque and inaccessible without insider knowledge. Together, the Hometract project and the STS research demonstrate that overcoming infrastructural exclusion requires both technical innovation and critical attention to the social systems in which that technology operates. Hometract provides one model for how technological tools can actively reshape inequitable infrastructures to promote greater inclusion.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Technical Advisor: Brianna Morrison

STS Advisor: Rider Foley