HUG, HF and SGI to share data on landlords who withheld jeonse deposits

Korea Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation (HUG), Korea Housing Finance Corporation (HF) and SGI Seoul Guarantee (SGI) announced Monday they will jointly launch a landlord guarantee-ban information-sharing system starting Oct. 1. The measure aims to prevent repeat jeonse fraud and head off guarantee incidents by restricting jeonse guarantee issuance for landlords who failed to return deposits to tenants and had those deposits covered by the three institutions on their behalf.

The three institutions plan to share subrogation payment data — records of cases in which a guarantee institution paid a tenant's jeonse deposit after the landlord failed to return it.

The move is a follow-up to the household debt management plan the Financial Services Commission announced on Feb. 27 last year, and is part of a broader effort to build an information-sharing infrastructure to prevent real estate financial fraud.

Under the arrangement, each guarantee institution will send its landlord guarantee-ban data to Korea Credit Information Services, which will consolidate the information and redistribute it to all three institutions.

Under a revision to the Credit Information Act enforcement decree that took effect Feb. 3, data on landlords who have not returned deposits can be collected and shared without the landlord's consent. Information on such landlords arising after that effective date will be shared under the new system. However, the actual ban on issuing guarantees to those landlords will not take effect until Oct. 1.

In addition, starting Sept. 21, users will be able to check whether a landlord is subject to a guarantee ban through the landlord information lookup menu on HUG's Ansim Jeonse app.

Meanwhile, the government said Thursday that the number of jeonse fraud-affected homes purchased under its buyback program had surpassed 10,000. The number of officially recognized jeonse fraud victims has also exceeded 40,000, and residential, financial and legal support cases have topped 70,000, with recovery assistance picking up pace.