[INTERVIEW] Enkorwithus aims to bring foreigners together through housing platform

Finding a place to live and overcoming loneliness are some of the biggest struggles for foreigners new to Korea, and Enkorwithus aims to solve both problems with sharehouses that connect residents.

Oh Jung-hoon, CEO of Enkorwithus, poses for a photo in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the startup's office in Jung District, central Seoul [PARK SANG-MOON]

Finding a place to live and overcoming loneliness are some of the biggest struggles for foreigners new to Korea, and Enkorwithus aims to solve both problems with sharehouses that connect residents.

"Korea's brand image has become more positive due to K-pop and Korean culture, and there's a lot more foreigners coming to Korea," CEO of Enkorwithus, Oh Jung-hoon, said. "But they tend to be isolated and not get access to the same benefits or infrastructure."

"So I wanted to at least provide proper housing to them."

Enkor Stay is a startup founded in 2020, operating sharehouses in 15 buildings as of August, with a total of 300 rooms.

Aiming to connect its residents, the startup organizes various meet-ups, Halloween parties and even Korean language classes for residents and others who want to join. More than 15,000 found housing through the company, and around 40,000 to 50,000 people participated in its programs.

It also brokers houses and studio apartments for rent through its Enkor Stay website, which is all available in English. The company's revenue streams include getting commission for each house rented through its platform and fees collected from other services such as renting bedding and selling pre-paid SIM cards.

The startup earned revenue of 2 billion won ($1.5 million) in 2022, up 150 percent on year. It expects to earn revenue of 4 billion won this year.

Oh sat down with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the startup's office in Jung District, central Seoul, to talk about how the company aims to help foreigners feel less isolated in Korea.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among other things, why did you start with helping foreigners find housing to achieve your bigger goal of helping them feel more connected in Korea?

I first opened a sharehouse and promoted it to international students, and the response I got was really positive. They told me they were able to find Korean friends and even get to know students from Yonsei University while going to Korea University. After all that, I wanted to create a community where I could bring together all the different foreigners scattered throughout Korea.

So I started with a sharehouse, then moved on to brokering other types of housing. We now opened a new co-living house called Enkorplex. It isn't just a place to live. It is a social space where people can gather.

A trivia night hosted by Enkorstay [SCREEN CAPTURE]

How is Enkor Stay different from other English rental listing services?

One of the biggest expat communities in the world is Craigslist. We also uploaded posts looking for sharehouse residents there. But even if you do find a house through the website, there are a lot of difficulties for foreigners, such as figuring out Korea's deposit system or the listing being different from photos online. Also, foreigners looking for a house in Korea while they are abroad may feel anxious about having to send a huge amount of money without knowing who the landlord is.

We wanted to ensure there are no such problems when finding houses through us. We allow payments through credit cards on our website, and sharehouses run by us have no deposits.

Are there any inspection procedures that landlords on Enkor Stay go through?

We review all of our landlords. We visit all the houses and only post rental listings of houses that we think are okay for foreigners to live in. We don't plan on becoming a major brokerage service like Zigbang or Dabang and would rather provide reliable listings. There are around 200,000 international students in Korea, and our service is not something 10 or 20 million people use. We want to focus on carefully selecting individuals who are going to provide satisfactory services to international students.

Some landlords avoid having foreigners as their tenants, citing communication difficulties or other discriminative reasons. Was it difficult to find landlords who are foreigner-friendly?

We are currently working with foreigner-friendly landlords who can at least do basic-level communications with them. We also plan to appeal to those hosts by providing convenient tenant management systems. Most landlords tend to have over 50 tenants in houses they own, and they all communicate with them individually through KakaoTalk. But we have our own messaging system. Landlords also have to collect maintenance fees from tenants individually, but we have an admin system that allows landlords to send invoices and charge fees all at once.

We are planning to add an automatic translation feature to our messaging service, like what's offered at Airbnb, and adding those features will allow us to scale up. Also, landlords can charge a bit higher rent if they lease to foreigners looking for shorter stays [as short-term stay rent tends to be higher than long-term stays], so the landlords we work with prefer foreigners.

You opened the first Enkorplex branch in March. How is Enkorplex different than other sharehouses run by the company?

There are going to be more Enkorplex venues in the future, and we're not going to limit them to being just co-living spaces. We plan on making them like cafes that people can go to. It will be a place to socialize and where language exchanges regularly take place. Koreans and foreigners will be able to mingle with each other, enjoy tea or a cup of beer and even host Halloween and Christmas parties.

At Enkorplex, an environment that allows Koreans and foreigners to come together, they will enjoy experiences they wouldn't be able to have on their own. In the future, our users will be able to host and sell their experiences to other tourists. They'll know all the trendy places. It won't be just going to an expensive restaurant to eat bibimbap and touring the Gyeongbok Palace. It could be a tour of Korean restaurants that locals know, led by a French who lived in Korea for two years. It's our goal to make those experiences into content that can be marketed.

Enkorplex and all sharehouses run by Enkorwithus are in Seoul. Do you plan on expanding to other cities as the company grows?

Our business is going to be focused on Seoul until next year. We want to make foreigners want to come to Seoul due to the various services, infrastructure and communities that Enkorwithus offers.

But we do plan on expanding to Gyeonggi by 2025. Foreigners struggle to find housing due to having limited choices, but foreigners living in Gyeonggi have even fewer options than those in Seoul. If you look on Craigslist, the rental listings are literally only for houses in Seoul. But there are a lot of international students in Gyeonggi studying at schools like Ajou University, Kyonggi University and Dankook University. After we focus on expanding in the greater Seoul area until 2025, we then plan to expand nationwide to areas near universities.

We will continue to offer more housing options through us, whether it's sharehouses on our side or having more rental listings from landlords. But one thing we want to try is allowing our users to swap houses during their stay. For example, someone living in Seoul might want to try living in Gangwon or Busan for a month. Those living in Busan may want to try living in Seoul during the vacation. We could sign a four-month contract with them, allowing them to live in different places in Korea every month. We still have a long way to go, but that is something we are considering doing.

Apart from housing-related services, are there any other fields you want to expand into?

We plan on expanding our target audience to tourists. We are going to introduce a platform where companies can sell products such as vouchers for restaurants and beauty-related services next year. Hair and beauty salons are very cheap here compared to in other countries. Countries like Japan charge double or three times ours, and just getting a haircut is 200,000 to 300,000 won ($150 to $225) in the United States, so we think there will be demand.

It will be easier to think of it as a Naver Smart Store for tourists and international students. Korea is a country with good IT infrastructure, but foreigners can't access a lot of it. We built a payment system that allows people to pay with foreign cards. There is a payment gateway company that processes payments from almost all credit cards issued around the world, and we are implementing the system so foreigners can easily make payments in Korea.

BY LEE TAE-HEE [lee.taehee2@joongang.co.kr]