About the large deposits in Korea

Hey cuz,

One thing that surprises people here is nobody really screens you. No credit pull. No deep background checks. No proof of income.

Instead, the system leans heavily on two things:

How much are you putting down?
And how long are you staying?

Once those two are set, deals move surprisingly fast.

I mean, the deposits are large enough to buffer the risk. If a tenant stops paying rent, things can drag for 10 months. So numbers like 1000/100 stop feeling completely random. ₩10M deposit, ₩1M rent.

Deposits also quietly filter people. Someone putting down ₩20M behaves differently than someone stretching ₩5M. Landlords don’t need to say it out loud. The number does it for them.

And once the lease is properly set up, the tenant side becomes surprisingly strong too. Now the landlord can’t easily push you around either.

So the structure becomes a little interesting.

The landlord holds the deposit.
The tenant holds position.

That balance is a big part of why the system behaves the way it does.

Stay steady,
--JK

P.S. Before entering this system seriously, it helps to become a little more grounded in what you actually want, what you can comfortably carry, and how the market really moves.
That’s the idea behind Search Pregame.