SEOUL: For a decade, Park Hyeon-su lived in a windowless micro-apartment in Seoul, working double shifts and saving every penny for a deposit on a nice home. Then real estate scammers took his money.
South Korea’s rental housing market features a unique system known as “jeonse” in which tenants pay huge deposits – sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars – then get to live rent-free for years, before getting all their money back when they move out.
The idea is that landlords get access to interest-free cash for speculation, and tenants get free housing, with the property as collateral. But the system is now rife with fraud – police data suggests more than a billion dollars is lost to jeonse scams every year.
The system once accounted for two-thirds of the rental market in the 1990s, but has fallen in popularity, partly due to growing awareness of the risks.
Park told AFP he often worked from 9am to midnight in menial delivery-related jobs to save up US$73,000. But after he had paid a deposit and moved in, his purported landlord – who it turns out had never had the authority to lease the property – vanished and Park was evicted, with no way to get his money back.
It was not just cash, he told AFP, but “my entire 20s and early 30s” that was stolen, and while legal proceedings are ongoing, he is highly unlikely to get restitution.
“My dream of owning a home has vanished, and I’ve given up on dating, not to mention getting married or having a child,” said Park, 37, who uses a pseudonym for his jeonse activism to protect his privacy.
