Use Free One-Person Household Data to Choose a Neighborhood for Testing Local Services

The raw data for assessing neighborhood demand now costs nothing

South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety (행정안전부), the national agency responsible for resident registration, publishes the number of one-person households registered in each legal dong, broken down by gender and age. The file for the end of September 2026 has 18,627 rows and was registered on the Public Data Portal (공공데이터포털) on October 2.

A legal dong is a geographic unit used in Korea to manage addresses and land. The file includes the city, county, or district; the legal dong name; the total number of one-person households; gender; and counts for every age from 0 to 109. People aged 110 and over are grouped together.

The data is updated monthly, and the file is free to use. It can be downloaded without logging in, so even a small organization or shop can examine candidate areas in a spreadsheet before hiring a developer.

To have a service retrieve new data automatically, you need to register with the Public Data Portal and apply to use it. This automated connection is free, but requests can be restricted if too many are made at once. The basic request limit is not published as a number on the relevant page.

What has become cheaper is not field research itself, but the screening of candidate areas before it. You can now download nationwide data with more than 18,000 rows at no cost and narrow down where to investigate first.

Filter your first service area before choosing it by instinct

Consider a welfare organization worker in one city who connects older residents with grocery shopping and simple home repairs. They may currently choose the next service area based on requests from community service centers, welfare center consultation records, and what field staff remember, all kept in separate documents.

With that approach, only areas that send many requests can appear to have high demand. Areas where people need help but do not know the organization or do not call are missed. One-person households among younger adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults are also combined into one number.

With the new data, you can first choose the age range that fits your service. For grocery shopping for older adults, compare the number of older one-person households by legal dong. For home repairs for middle-aged adults, add the relevant age range separately and compare candidate areas side by side.

Next, turn candidate areas into practical operating zones. The administrative dong served by a community service center and the legal dong used in an address can have different boundaries. If one legal dong crosses several administrative dongs, label the figure as an estimate rather than an exact number for each jurisdiction.

Do not show only the number of one-person households on the screen. Show the reference month, age range, and realistic travel distance as well. An increase in one-person households in the target age group from the previous month does not automatically mean more orders or consultations.

Field verification is still work for people. Resident registration data excludes foreign nationals but includes people with unknown residence and overseas Koreans. A registered address may also differ from where someone actually lives, so you still need to ask local shops, welfare centers, and building management offices about demand in candidate areas.

You also cannot use this data to find a specific person’s name or contact details. Its use is not to identify individuals, but to find neighborhoods with many one-person households in the target age group and test leaflet distribution, partner recruitment, or reservations there first.

Abroad, delivery and visiting networks have been adapted for care

Nara Co-op (나라코프) in Nara Prefecture, Japan, added support for older adults to its existing consumer cooperative delivery network. Registered welfare-discount users aged 75 and over receive a discount on regular individual delivery fees to about KRW 840 per delivery. If delivery staff notice unusual signs during delivery, the system connects with the local government.

The service has agreements with 23 local governments in Nara Prefecture for checking on older residents. Rather than building a visiting organization from scratch, it turns an existing delivery route that already reaches people’s doors regularly into a check-in point.

La Poste (라포스트), France’s postal company, operates Veiller sur mes parents (베이에 쉬르 메 파랑), in which postal workers visit older adults on set days. Family members can check visit results on their phones, and one visit a week is listed at about KRW 35,900 per month.

La Poste says it began the service on its existing mail-delivery network and has supported a cumulative 50,000 people since launch. This is the company’s own figure, but it shows an operating direction: users may pay for a person who visits regularly, rather than only for an alert device.

Iitate City (이다테시) in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, provided communication-enabled electric kettles, light bulbs, and motion sensors to older adults living alone from November 2020 through the following March. During the pilot, the city covered installation and monthly fees. People who wanted to continue afterward paid the monthly fee themselves.

Of 45 applications, 31 led to actual use, and 10 cases continued as paid use after the subsidy ended. The project was criticized because it sent only everyday-life signals to family members without emergency dispatch, and because the devices did not fit normal daily routines. It shows that data alerts alone are not enough: a process for people to respond is also needed.

Four things you can start from this data

1. Find candidate areas for joint delivery by side-dish shops

What the service does: Select pilot areas by overlaying neighborhoods with many older one-person households and the delivery areas of participating shops. Who uses it: Neighborhood side-dish shops starting delivery for the first time, and groups of traditional market merchants.

Why now: Free monthly data lets them compare the size of the target population by neighborhood before spending on advertising across the entire area. The first screen should show the reference month, the number of older one-person households, participating shop locations, and candidate zones that can be covered in a single delivery route.

2. Recommend service zones for small home-repair visits

What the service does: Group short daily-support requests, such as changing light bulbs, installing handles, or moving furniture, and plan visiting routes. Who uses it: Home-repair cooperatives working from welfare center referrals, or local volunteer coordinators.

Why now: They can recruit partner organizations first where one-person households in the target age group are concentrated, reducing trips through neighborhoods with no work. The first screen should include an age selector, the target population by legal dong, submitted jobs, and available visiting days.

3. Select pilot areas for a parent check-in service

What the service does: Let families request their preferred check-in method: regular calls, visits, or meal delivery. Who uses it: Home-care organizations and meal-delivery businesses seeking adult children who live in another area as customers.

Why now: After narrowing down neighborhoods with many older one-person households for free, they can test actual family willingness to pay and response capacity in a small area. The first screen should include the parent’s neighborhood, desired check-in frequency, the person to contact if something is wrong, and whether an on-site response is available.

4. Map gaps in local daily support

What the service does: Show the size of the one-person household population alongside side-dish delivery, welfare centers, hospital accompaniment, and home-repair providers to identify places with too few services. Who uses it: District government welfare departments and local welfare foundations that must choose service areas for the following year.

Why now: Using monthly resident-registration data as a common baseline lets organizations compare their separate lists at the same neighborhood level. The first screen should show one-person household counts by age group, available organizations, whether there is a waiting list, and daily-support categories with no provider yet.

Why this matters where you are

This is a Korean condition: the data comes from South Korea’s resident-registration system, uses legal-dong geography, and is distributed through a national public data portal. Check whether your market has a comparable free, regularly updated small-area dataset, and whether its geographic units match the areas your team can actually visit or deliver to. Wherever you operate, use population data to narrow the test area, then verify demand and response capacity on the ground.

What to check in 30 minutes today

Download the latest file, keep only the city, county, or district where you plan to operate, and list legal dongs with the most one-person households in your target age range. If the top candidates form a nearby area that you can actually deliver to or visit, they may be worth testing. If they are scattered far apart, choose a different area or consider a service that does not require visits.