Korean Tenant Transaction Assurance — Policy Research

Overview

Policy research and competition submission addressing a structural gap in Korean residential lease transactions: tenants cannot independently verify the full legal risk of a property before signing. The current system requires landlord disclosure and landlord cooperation for registry access — creating an information asymmetry that the 전세사기 crisis (36,950 confirmed victims) demonstrated to be genuinely harmful at scale. The proposal designs a public institutional mechanism — tenant-initiated registry verification through HUG or 한국부동산원 as the intermediary — within the existing constraints of 변호사법 §109, 개인정보보호법, and 주택임대차보호법.

Problem

Korean tenants signing 전세 leases commit deposits of tens to hundreds of millions of won with limited access to the registry information that would reveal whether the property is over-mortgaged, 신탁-encumbered, or at risk of forced auction. The 등기부등본 (property registry certificate) is available through the court registry system, but tenants must rely on landlord-provided copies, which can be outdated or selectively disclosed. The 주택임대차보호법 §3의2 inspection right allows tenants to request registry access at signing — but requires landlord cooperation to exercise meaningfully. The 전세사기 crisis demonstrated at scale what happens when this information asymmetry is exploited systematically.

Constraints

• 변호사법 §109: the proposed service cannot characterize specific contract terms as lawful or unlawful, cannot advise signing or refusing, and cannot provide legal opinions on the landlord's title situation — it can only produce factual registry data
• 개인정보보호법: tenant-initiated registry pulls have different consent and data processing requirements than landlord-initiated or court-ordered pulls — the intermediary model (HUG or REB as the requesting entity) resolves this by making the pull institutional rather than individual
• The proposal must be compatible with existing 주택임대차보호법 infrastructure rather than requiring new legislation — it is designed as an administrative expansion of existing HUG/REB mandates, not a new statutory framework
• Competition submission format (공모전 제안서): 3,761 characters, single PDF, within word limit — forces precise policy articulation without room for hedged language

Approach

Legal framework analysis first: mapped the 변호사법 §109 constraint boundary, identified the institutional intermediary model as the compliance path, and verified that existing HUG and 한국부동산원 mandates are broad enough to accommodate a tenant-verification service without new legislation. Policy mechanism design: tenant initiates request via HUG/REB portal → intermediary pulls 등기정보광장 data under its existing statutory mandate → delivers structured registry summary to tenant. Fact-checked by external audit before submission (4 statistics corrected). The proof-of-concept was operationalized as lease-risk-engine V0, demonstrating technical feasibility using the public IROS district data layer.

Key Decisions

Tech Stack

• Policy research and legal framework analysis
• 주택임대차보호법, 변호사법 §109, 개인정보보호법
• HUG and 한국부동산원 mandate review
• lease-risk-engine V0 (technical proof-of-concept)

Result & Impact

• 36,950 confirmed 전세사기 victims (2024)
  Affected population
• 한국부동산원 주거권 보장 아이디어 공모전 2026-05-08
  Competition submission
• 변호사법 §109, 개인정보보호법, 주택임대차보호법
  Legal framework documents
• lease-risk-engine V0 (228 districts, 0 errors)
  Technical proof-of-concept

The proposal identifies a specific institutional mechanism (HUG/REB intermediary) that fits within existing statutory authority and resolves the consent and legal characterization constraints that make direct tenant API access legally complex. The 전세사기 crisis provides the policy rationale at scale: 36,950 confirmed victims, the majority of whom lacked access to the registry information that would have revealed the risk before signing.

Learnings

• Policy design within existing statutory constraints is more tractable than it appears. The key is identifying which existing institution already has statutory authority to do what the policy proposes, and designing the mechanism as an administrative expansion rather than a new legal obligation.
• Building a technical proof-of-concept before a policy competition submission changes the quality of the submission. The existence of lease-risk-engine V0 — however limited — makes the proposal's feasibility claims concrete rather than asserted.
• The 변호사법 §109 constraint is not a blocker for factual registry services — it is a precision constraint. It defines exactly what the service cannot do (characterize clauses, recommend actions) while leaving room for what it can do (produce factual registry data in structured form). Designing within the constraint from the start is much easier than retrofitting compliance.
• External fact-checking before submission is not optional. Four statistics in the initial draft were incorrect — not materially wrong, but incorrectly sourced or stated with more precision than the primary source supports. A submission with correctable factual errors is weaker than it needs to be.