Seoul City Conducts Full Survey of 111 Local Housing Cooperatives to Prevent Member Losses

Local housing cooperatives that recruit members through false advertisements such as "You can purchase a newly built apartment at a low cost" and "You must join quickly to select royal floors, building, and unit numbers," and fail to properly carry out the project will be identified.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced on the 10th that it will conduct a full-scale survey of 111 local housing cooperatives in Seoul from August 14 to September 15.

Originally, there are a total of 118 local housing cooperatives in Seoul, but 7 of them were already subject to a sample survey in the first half of this year, which uncovered 60 cases of administrative procedure violations.

The local housing cooperative project, where many members who want to secure housing form a cooperative to build multi-family housing, is promoted by the cooperative itself rather than a developer, so if it proceeds normally, it is possible to acquire newly built apartments at a relatively low cost.

However, there have been cases where local housing cooperatives have caused harm to honest members by using false or exaggerated advertisements to recruit members, demanding excessive additional contributions during the project, and refusing withdrawal or refund requests.

The city plans to focus its investigation on representative damage cases reported in local housing cooperatives, such as member recruitment through false or exaggerated advertisements, increased member burdens due to delays in land acquisition, lack of expertise in cooperatives and management agencies, and difficulties in refunding costs when members wish to withdraw.

Among the 111 cooperatives, 96 will be investigated by joint inspection teams formed by the autonomous districts to which the cooperatives belong, and the city will directly investigate 5 cooperatives where many complaints have been filed, together with the autonomous districts and experts.

The city will disclose the results of the survey on the websites of the autonomous districts and the cooperatives, and will take strong administrative actions such as imposing fines, requesting investigations, and filing charges for violations of related regulations such as the Housing Act.

Han Byung-yong, Director of the Housing Policy Office of Seoul City, said, "Through the local housing cooperative survey, we will prevent member damages and strengthen management and supervision so that cooperatives can operate transparently," adding, "We will continue to conduct surveys in the future and actively implement follow-up measures based on the results, including finding tasks for system improvement."

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