사진 확대

The economic burden on tenants is expected to increase from the end of this month. This is because jeonse guarantee fees will increase by up to 37%, and fundamental risks such as jeonse fraud have not been resolved, raising concerns that "only tenants will suffer damage."

According to the housing industry on the 28th, the Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation (HUG) will reorganize the lease guarantee fee system from the 31st. The main point of this reorganization is to raise the guarantee fee rate for charter contracts with a high risk of guarantee accidents, and to lower the risk if the risk is low.

After the reorganization, the jeonse guarantee rate will be changed from 0.115% to 0.154% per year to 0.097 to 0.211% per year. As a result, the burden of tenants on rental houses with high deposits or high lease rates is expected to increase significantly.

For example, tenants living in multi-family houses with a deposit of 510 million won will see their guarantee fees rise from 785,400 won to 1,076,100 won per year. On the other hand, in the case of apartments with low deposits (KRW 90 million), the annual guarantee fee will be slightly reduced (15.7%) from KRW 103,500 to KRW 87,300.

However, considering the recent accident rate, industry and experts say it will be virtually difficult for tenants to expect a reduction in guarantee fees. The essence of the reorganization lies in raising guarantee fees for many tenants to make up for HUG's losses caused by increased accident rates.

Accidents with lease guarantees have been on the rise in recent years. In the first half of last year, the accident rate remained high at 8.9% and last year's overall accident rate remained high at 8.1%. In February this year, the accident rate for the last three months temporarily decreased to 4.0%, but experts say that it is difficult to see it as a long-term improvement.

HUG's subrogation payments to tenants on behalf of landlords increased more than 11 times (1108%) over the past three years from 504.1 billion won at the end of 2021 to 6.94 trillion won at the end of last year. As a result, the government provided huge public funds to HUG.

HUG's recovery rate over the past three years seems to be good at 90.9%, but the unrecovered amount alone reached 35.1 billion won, which is a big burden. There are also concerns that tenants may be more exposed to risks such as jeonse fraud or non-return of deposits. This is because even though the increase in guarantee fees has increased, general landlords who are not rental businesses are not obligated to subscribe to guarantee insurance.

HUG has released interest-free installments of guarantees and one-time renewal special cases for existing contractors to ease the burden on tenants, but many market watchers say that the effectiveness is insignificant due to the large increase in basic guarantee fees and limited discounts to homeless people.

Experts say that it is urgent to come up with more fundamental measures, such as requiring lessors to subscribe to guarantee insurance and strengthening the management of actual transaction prices of jeonse.