Preventing Recurrence of the 'Villa King Incident'... Government Develops Measures to Expedite Leasehold Registration

Villa King Graphic

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyung-min] The law will be amended to allow tenants to promptly register their lease rights when the landlord passes away. This measure was introduced by the government to prevent incidents like the recent public outrage over the "Villa King" victim case.

The Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport jointly announced on the 18th that the "Task Force (TF) for Legal Support for Tenants Victimized by Jeonse Fraud" will publicly notify the proposed amendment to the "Housing Lease Protection Act" reflecting this content.

Under the current law, before requesting lease rights registration, the order for lease rights registration must be notified to the landlord. Therefore, if the landlord dies and the inheritance relationship is not settled, or if the landlord's address is unknown or delivery is evaded, timely lease rights registration has been difficult to carry out properly.

For example, when the landlord dies, the tenant had to go through a "subrogated inheritance registration" process to register the lease rights under the heir's name. At this time, tenants had to pay the acquisition tax (2.98%) due to ownership transfer on behalf of the heirs, which was burdensome. For a villa worth about 200 million KRW, the tax was approximately 6 million KRW.

Accordingly, the government plans to add a provision from the Civil Execution Act stating "provisional seizure execution can be carried out before the debtor is served with the court order" to the lease rights registration order clause of the "Housing Lease Protection Act." This will allow lease rights registration even before the landlord is notified of the lease rights registration order. Without going through subrogated inheritance registration, the lease rights registration order can be issued with the landlord's heir as the respondent, and lease rights registration can be completed. The notification procedure to the landlord after the court's lease rights registration order will also be eliminated.

The government expects that this will save time and costs previously required for the lease rights registration process. The TF will collect various opinions during the public notice period from the 19th to the 2nd of next month, finalize the amendment, and submit it to the National Assembly next month after review by the Office of Legislation and the Deputy Prime Minister and Cabinet meeting.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.