About Living Plus

Living Plus

Overview

Living Plus (Korean: 리빙플러스) is a Korean-language weekly publication serving the Korean-Canadian community of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area. It describes itself in Korean as an entertainment general-interest specialist weekly magazine, and its presentation today is dominated by two things: lifestyle and entertainment content for Korean readers, and one of the most practical tools a newcomer community uses — classified listings, above all real estate.

That combination is visible on its website, livingplus.ca, which is live and current. The site's masthead promotes Toronto real estate search, job postings, room rentals and buy-and-sell classifieds alongside its weekly-magazine identity, and its front page is filled with up-to-date property listings drawn from brokerages across southern Ontario. For Korean-speaking residents of the Toronto area — immigrants house-hunting, renting a room, looking for work or following Korean entertainment — Living Plus packages the functions of a community weekly and a listings portal in a single Korean-language destination.

History

Living Plus belongs to a well-documented tradition of Korean-language publishing in Toronto. Korean newspapers have been part of the city's immigrant life for decades, and researchers at the University of Toronto's Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library have described them as crucial sources of information for Korean immigrants in Canada — both about politics in North and South Korea and about the evolution of Toronto's own Korean community — noting that publishers donated their papers to the library on an ongoing basis because they understood that role. The library's digitization project preserved two historic titles, Minjoong Shinmoon and The New Korea Times, as a record of that era of print community journalism. Minjoong Shinmoon was a weekly published and edited by Chul-ki Chung that introduced Korean culture and heritage to second-generation Koreans in Toronto while commenting on human rights in South Korea; The New Korea Times, another weekly, carried news from Korea alongside articles on the Korean-Canadian community, and the library's run of it spans May 1982 to May 2003. Between them, the two digitized papers total more than 7,400 pages — a measure of how much Korean-language print journalism Toronto produced in the late twentieth century.

The Korean-language press in Toronto has since diversified beyond the news-centred dailies and weeklies of that period into specialized formats: church and business directories, real estate papers, and free lifestyle and entertainment weeklies supported by classified and display advertising from Korean businesses. Living Plus is a product of that later landscape. Its very format — an entertainment and general-interest weekly whose website foregrounds property listings, rentals, jobs and buy-and-sell ads — reflects how Korean community media in Toronto adapted to readers whose most pressing questions were practical: where to live, where to work, and how to furnish a new life in Canada, alongside news and entertainment from home.

Detailed corporate history for Living Plus — a founding date or a named publisher — is not published in the publicly accessible sources consulted for this profile, and this profile does not invent one. What can be verified directly is the publication's present-day operation: a Korean-language weekly identity, an actively maintained website carrying current listings and content, and a readership addressed entirely in Korean.

Content and Coverage

The publication's own description of itself, in its Korean masthead, is an "entertainment comprehensive specialist weekly" (연예 종합전문주간지), and entertainment coverage of Korean popular culture is one of its pillars — the standard fare of Korean community weeklies, which keep readers connected to television, film and celebrity news from South Korea as well as community events in Canada.

Its most distinctive content, however, is practical. Living Plus's website organizes the material its readers come for into the categories named in its own header: Toronto property search (토론토 매물 검색), jobs (구인구직), room rentals (방렌트) and buy-and-sell classifieds (사고팔기). When this profile was prepared, the site's property section carried current listings from brokerages including RE/MAX, Royal LePage, HomeLife and Keller Williams offices — homes for sale and for rent in Toronto and across the wider region, among them Waterdown, Hamilton, Kitchener, St. Catharines, London, Brantford, Milton and Severn. That geographic spread mirrors where Korean-Canadian families now buy and rent homes: well beyond the traditional downtown Koreatown and the North York corridor, into suburbs across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

The editorial logic is consistent: a weekly entertainment magazine draws the audience, and the classified and real-estate sections — historically the revenue engine of free community weeklies — serve the audience's settlement needs. Jobs and room rentals in particular are the classic first needs of newly arrived immigrants, international students and working-holiday makers, all significant constituencies in Toronto's Korean community.

Audience and Reach

Living Plus addresses Korean-speaking readers in the Toronto area. The community is substantial: the 2016 Census counted 33,665 people with Korean as their mother tongue in the City of Toronto alone, and the City of Toronto's 2021 Census backgrounder still listed Korean among the most common non-official languages used at work in the city. Korean speakers are also concentrated in the northern suburbs along the Yonge Street corridor — North York, Thornhill, Richmond Hill and Markham — where Korean churches, supermarkets, tutoring academies and businesses form one of Canada's most complete Korean commercial ecosystems. It is precisely the readership that Korean-language real estate, rental and job listings serve.

No circulation or readership figures for Living Plus are published in the sources consulted for this profile, and none are claimed here. The publication's reach is best gauged qualitatively: it maintains a current, searchable, Korean-language listings and entertainment service for the largest Korean community in Canada, in a media market where Korean readers are also served by daily newspapers, broadcasters and a dense ecosystem of Korean web portals and social media.

Digital Presence

Living Plus's digital home is livingplus.ca, a Korean-language website built on WordPress. Its real-estate section integrates live listing data through the RealtyPress listings platform — the property pages carry brokerage attributions and the structured details (bedrooms, bathrooms, floor area, list price, rental terms) characteristic of a multiple-listing feed — which keeps the site's busiest section current without manual updating. Individual listings are presented with photographs, asking prices ranging from condominium-level homes to multi-million-dollar houses, open-house flags where applicable, and the selling brokerage's name, in the same format a mainstream Canadian property portal would use — except that the entire experience, from navigation to category labels, is in Korean. Listings are searchable by location, and the site presents rental and sale properties side by side, a format aimed at readers comparing options across the region.

The site's structure confirms the publication's hybrid identity: it is simultaneously the online edition of a Korean weekly magazine and a working classifieds portal. In a community where print weeklies were once picked up at Korean supermarkets and churches, that portal function — updated listings, searchable in Korean, on a phone — is how a publication like Living Plus retains its role.

Ownership and Organisation

Living Plus is published in Toronto under its Korean name, 리빙플러스, for the Korean-Canadian market. The publication does not publish detailed corporate information — ownership, executive names or a founding date — in the sources accessible to this profile, and community and library directories consulted do not add a named publisher; accordingly, none is asserted here. The operation is advertising-supported in the manner of comparable Korean community weeklies, with real estate and local business promotion at the centre of its commercial model, as its own website demonstrates.

Contact and Availability

Living Plus is available to readers online at livingplus.ca, in Korean. The website is the publication's current point of contact for readers and advertisers, offering Toronto-area real estate search, rentals, job postings and buy-and-sell classifieds alongside its weekly entertainment and lifestyle content. Korean-speaking residents of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area — and newcomers researching a move to the region — are its intended audience.