The number of multiple home owners in South Korea grew by the smallest number in six years last year due largely to heavy taxation on such people, data showed Tuesday.

The number of multiple home owners had reached 2.32 million as of Nov. 1, 2020, up from 2.28 million the previous year, according to Statistics Korea.

The 2020 growth marked the slowest gain since 2014, when the number of such people grew by 28,000.

The portion of people who have two or more houses accounted for 15.8 percent of the total home owners of 14.7 million, down 0.1 percentage point from a year earlier. The proportion also declined for the first time since 2014.

The statistics agency said the government's housing policy appeared to take effect in some speculative areas, such as Seoul and Gyeonggi Province that surrounds the capital, as the number of multiple home owners fell there.

The number of people who possess one house came to 12.4 million, taking up 84.2 percent of the total home owners, the data showed.

The number of new first-time home buyers reached 980,000 in the cited period. Of them, the portion of people having one house came to 96.1 percent of the total.

In land-starved and densely populated South Korea, owning a home has been long regarded as the main way to boost a person's assets.

The government has rolled out a series of measures to curb skyrocketing housing prices, including tax hikes and loan regulations. But the measures still resulted in only a short-term letup in housing prices.

Amid expectations for further gains in home prices, more people took out loans to buy houses amid low borrowing costs, making household debt hit a record high.

Household credit had reached a record high of 1,805.9 trillion won ($1.53 trillion) as of end-June, up 41.2 trillion won from three months earlier, according to central bank data. (Yonhap)