33m2 - Korea Short-Term Rental

Review by eFreeware

33m2 is a short-term rental app for Korea, built by the Seoul company SPACEV. It connects people who need a place to live for a week or longer with units that are rented out on that basis, and it handles the lease itself rather than leaving you to arrange one separately. The app is free to download.

The reason to consider it is the gap it fills. A hotel works for a few nights, and a standard Korean lease runs for a year or more, so anyone in between tends to improvise. 33m2 is built for that middle ground: stays measured in weeks and months, with a lease you can sign remotely and a deposit held by the platform. More than a million people have installed it, and its 4.9 average across 9,848 ratings suggests the model lands well with the people who use it.

What you can actually book

The catalog covers one-room studios, officetels and apartments, and it extends to residences, hotels, guesthouses and vacation rentals as well. Officetels matter here because they are a common Korean building type that mixes living space with small offices, and they are often available on terms that suit a shorter stay. Rentals start at one week, and the developer says you can extend for as long as you need, which makes the app usable for a stay whose length you cannot pin down at the start.

Coverage is national rather than limited to the capital. Month-long options appear across Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon, Jeju, Busan and Gangwon, which is a wide spread: a dense commuter belt, an island, a southern port city and a mountainous province. In practice that means the app can serve both someone who needs to be near a particular office and someone who wants a month somewhere quieter.

Searching and filtering

You can search by region, by address, or on a map, and the map view can use your current position if you grant the location permission. That permission is optional, and the developer notes that some services remain usable without it, so you are not locked out of the app if you decline. I would expect the address search to be the more precise route when you already know the neighborhood you want, with the map better for judging how a unit sits relative to the rest of a district.

Filters cover rent, building type and other criteria, which matters more than it might sound. Short-term listings vary enormously in what they include and how they are priced, so narrowing by building type before you compare rents saves a lot of scrolling. The aim is to surface units that fit your situation quickly, and the combination of region, address, map and filters gives you several ways to get there.

Leases, deposits and payment

The lease is completed inside the app, with no visit to a real estate office and no paperwork to assemble by hand. Rent and maintenance fees can be paid entirely by credit card, which is a meaningful convenience for anyone who does not hold a Korean bank relationship or who would rather keep the expense on a card. The whole tenancy cycle, from signing to leaving, is handled online.

Money is handled through an escrow arrangement. The deposit is held by 33m2 and paid out only after you move in, and the company returns it to you at the end of the tenancy. The deposit is a flat 330,000 KRW rather than a negotiated figure that scales with the unit, which makes the upfront cost predictable before you start browsing. The developer also describes the rental costs as lower than hotels or bed-and-breakfast options and the service fees as far below what a traditional brokerage charges; those are comparative claims worth treating as the company's own pitch, though the flat deposit is a concrete number you can plan around.

Tenant reviews from previous occupants are shown alongside listings, which gives you a way to hear from someone who has actually lived in a unit before committing to it. For a short stay in an unfamiliar building, that is the kind of context that is hard to get any other way.

The host side of the app

33m2 is not only for tenants. A host can list a unit and let it on monthly or shorter terms, which helps keep it occupied when no long-term tenant is in place. Short stays are typically priced higher than a standard long-term lease, so the income argument is straightforward: more revenue per night, fewer empty weeks.

Contracts, move-in guidance and move-out instructions are all handled online, and rental payouts are processed through the app. Service fees are described as significantly cheaper than traditional brokerage rates. Hosts also get a dedicated one-to-one consultant for listing a room, working through the lease process and operational questions, which is the sort of support that matters if you are renting out a property for the first time.

What the app asks of you

The main requirement is simply that you are renting in Korea. The listings are Korean properties, the deposit is quoted in won, and the leases follow Korean rental practice, so the app is not a general travel booking tool that happens to include the country.

The other thing to weigh is the commitment itself. A one-week minimum is short by lease standards but long by hotel standards, and a lease signed through the app is still a lease. The escrow system protects the deposit, and the flat 330,000 KRW figure is knowable in advance, but you are entering a tenancy rather than reserving a room. Location permission is optional, and some services work without it, so declining costs you position-based map results rather than access to the app.

The app was released in December 2019 and was last updated in September 2026, with the most recent change focused on making the experience easier and safer for international tenants signing a short-term lease. That is a useful signal for anyone arriving from abroad, since the lease process is the part most likely to trip up someone who has not rented in Korea before.

Situations this fits

The clearest fit is a stay with a defined purpose and an uncertain end date. An extended business trip, a training course, an internship or an on-site project all need somewhere to live for weeks rather than nights, and the ability to extend without renegotiating everything is what makes the app work for them. The same goes for medical stays near a hospital, where a family member may need to be close by for an unpredictable stretch of outpatient treatment or caregiving.

The second group is people caught between homes. Move-in dates do not always line up when a monthly rent ends, a jeonse deposit is being settled, a purchase is closing or a new apartment is awaiting approval, and a gap of a few weeks is exactly what this app is designed to cover. Renovations belong here too: when a kitchen or bathroom is being rebuilt, a short lease nearby keeps the household functioning without moving everything twice.

There is also a quieter use case in trying a home before you commit to it. A month in a neighborhood tells you more about the commute, the noise and the neighbors than any amount of research, and if the fit is wrong you have lost a month rather than a year. People returning to Korea from overseas face a similar problem in reverse: they need somewhere settled to land before deciding where to stay long term. Anyone in these positions, and hosts with a unit that sits empty between long leases, is who this app is built for.

A practical choice for Korean stays of a month or more

For tenants, 33m2 solves a real problem with a sensible structure: a one-week minimum, a flat deposit, escrow protection, card payment and a lease signed remotely. The national coverage and the range of building types mean it can serve a business trip to Busan as readily as a month in Seoul, and the tenant reviews give you something concrete to weigh before signing. The 4.9 average from nearly ten thousand ratings is a strong record.

If you are looking for a place in Korea for a stretch measured in weeks or months, whether for work, family, renovation or the gap between two homes, this is worth installing and browsing before you look at hotels or a brokerage.

What's new in version 3.5.10

Korea’s No.1 short-term lease service, 33m2, has been updated. We’ve improved the app experience for international tenants, making it easier and safer for anyone looking for a home for a while in Korea to sign a short-term lease.