Dedicated auction unit launched July 1

Monthly average cases jump from 43 to 181

The headquarters of the Korea Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation. [HUG]
The headquarters of the Korea Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation. [HUG]

The Korea Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation has set up a dedicated auction unit at the Busan District Court, pushing the processing speed of auction cases in the region up roughly fourfold. The move is expected to accelerate both the recovery of subrogation bonds and the supply of jeonse public rental housing in the area.

According to HUG, the dedicated unit — established at the Busan District Court on July 1 — handled an average of 181 auction cases per month in July and August. That is about 4.2 times the monthly average of 43 cases recorded in the first half of this year, before the unit was created.

The improvement stems from transferring HUG-related cases out of the general auction division, where they had previously been handled alongside unrelated cases, and concentrating them in a dedicated department.

The unit was established after the Court Administration Office, the Busan District Court and HUG agreed on the need to expedite auction proceedings tied to jeonse deposit returns. HUG plans to hold regular working-level meetings with the Busan District Court to discuss ways to further shorten processing times.

The faster pace is also expected to speed up the supply of Deundeun Jeonse Housing — a public rental program under which HUG directly acquires auctioned properties and leases them at below-market rates — in the Busan area.

"The new dedicated auction unit has significantly strengthened the foundation for swift recovery of subrogation bonds in Busan," HUG President Choi In-ho said. "We hope this can serve as a model for cooperation that spreads to courts in other regions facing similar challenges, while also shortening bond recovery timelines."

Meanwhile, HUG recently built an AI-powered system that automatically generates pre-screening documents for property acquisitions through auction and public sale under the Deundeun Jeonse Housing program. The system extracts and converts key review items — such as housing type and ownership rights — directly from real estate registry records, cutting the time previously required for manual processing by 93 percent.


hwshin@heraldcorp.com