Newlywed couples who have owned a home since getting married had a greater chance of having children than newly married couples without homes, data showed Sunday, indicating that owning houses may affect childbirths.

Of 212,000 first-time and newly married couples who tied the knot in 2014 and maintained their martial status through 2019, 60,949 couples, or 28.7 percent, had their own home during the five years after getting married, according to the data by Statistics Korea.

Among the couples with houses, 83 percent had at least one child or an average of 1.16 children, the data showed.

In comparison, 40.7 percent of the newlyweds did not possess houses in the cited period, and 80.7 percent of them had an average of 1.13 kids.

In land-starved and densely populated South Korea, owning a home has been long regarded as the key way to inflate assets. Many newlywed couples here start marriage life by renting houses amid skyrocketing home prices.

South Korea is struggling with a sustained fall in childbirths as many young people delay marriage or give up on getting married or having babies amid a prolonged economic slowdown.

The country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime -- hit a new record low of 0.84 last year. It marked the third straight year that the rate was below 1 percent. (Yonhap)