A few months ago I sat in a real estate office in Dongtan with a tenant who’d just found “the one” — great light, quiet building, landlord seemed friendly. She was ready to sign on the spot. I asked her to slow down for five minutes and actually read the bottom of the page. She hadn’t even noticed there was a bottom section.
That’s the pattern I see over and over. People obsess over the rent and the deposit — understandably, since that’s real money — and then skim past everything else because the contract is in Korean, the agent is busy, and signing feels like the finish line. But in three years of doing repairs and maintenance calls across apartments in this area, I can tell you honestly: the fights I get pulled into almost never happen on move-in day. They happen on move-out day, months or years later, when nobody remembers what was agreed to and nobody can prove what the apartment looked like when they walked in.
So this time, instead of another generic checklist, I want to walk you through an actual contract — one I have sitting in front of me — and show you exactly what to look for.
Go through a licensed office, even if it costs a little more
I get why the private-deal route is tempting. You find a place on a Korean apartment app, message the landlord directly, and skip the agent altogether. No commission, no middleman. But if anything goes sideways later — deposit disputes, unclear terms, a landlord who suddenly isn’t answering — you have no one obligated to step in. A licensed agency (공인중개사사무소) is legally on the hook to help mediate and clarify what the contract actually says. That protection is worth more than the fee you’re trying to save.
Ask about the building’s debt before you hand over your deposit
Korean deposits (보증금) are usually a lot bigger than what people are used to from home — sometimes tens of millions of won sitting with a landlord for a year or two. Before that money moves anywhere, ask your agent to pull up the building’s registry and walk you through it. If there’s a heavy mortgage against the property, that’s not automatically a dealbreaker, but you deserve to know it before you commit, not after. A good agent won’t dodge the question.
The special terms section is where the real contract lives
Here’s the part almost everyone skips. Rent, deposit, and the lease dates are the easy stuff — anyone can read numbers. But the handwritten or typed clauses at the bottom, the 특약사항 (special terms), are where the landlord’s actual house rules show up. And once you sign, those clauses are just as binding as anything else on the page.
Take a look at this one:
This particular sheet spells out who pays for what utility, how the monthly management fee works, what happens if rent is late, and — easy to miss — a separate 100,000 KRW cleaning fee due when you move out.
Clauses like this are everywhere in Korean leases, and they’re rarely explained out loud during signing. A common one you’ll run into: if you break the lease early, you’re the one who pays the agent’s commission — even though it wasn’t automatically required by law before you agreed to it. Once it’s written in and signed, it’s real.
If you can’t read it, don’t just nod along. Photograph the page and run it through a translation app before you put your signature anywhere near it. It takes ten minutes and it can save you a genuinely painful amount of money down the road.
Here’s the front page of the same lease, for reference:
Notice how short the printed section is compared to how much detail gets crammed into the special terms box at the bottom — that gap is exactly the problem.
Mark the clauses you’ll actually need later
Once you’ve got a translation, don’t just close the file and forget about it. Flag the parts that matter:
- What happens if you need to leave early
- How the deposit refund actually works
- The move-out cleaning fee, if there is one
- Who’s responsible for repairs — you or the landlord
- Which utilities are bundled into the maintenance fee, and which aren’t
- How much notice you need to give before moving out
You will not remember any of this in eighteen months. Screenshot it, highlight it, whatever — just make sure future-you can find it without digging through a folder of scanned documents.
Photograph the apartment before a single box goes in
This is the one piece of advice I’d want every tenant to actually follow, not just read and forget. Before you move a single piece of furniture in, walk through the empty unit and photograph or film everything — floors, walls, ceilings, cabinets, bathroom fixtures. Scuffs, water stains, a hairline crack near the window, a cabinet door that doesn’t quite close. All of it.
Then don’t let those photos sit in your camera roll. Send them to your landlord or agent over KakaoTalk or text on day one. That single message becomes a timestamped record that the damage was already there — and it’s worth more than any argument you could make in person a year later.
Report problems as they happen, not on your way out the door
Most people don’t think about that pre-move-in album again until they’re packing boxes to leave. And that’s exactly when disputes flare up. Saying “that stain was already there when I moved in” two years after the fact just sounds like an excuse, fair or not — and without proof, the landlord is within their rights to deduct repair costs from your deposit. The photos you sent on day one are the thing that actually protects you here.
None of this is about preparing for a fight
I want to be clear about the spirit of all this: it’s not about assuming your landlord is out to get you. Most landlords and tenants both just want the lease to go smoothly. The point of reading the fine print and documenting the apartment isn’t paranoia — it’s removing the ambiguity that turns small misunderstandings into real arguments. A little effort on day one buys you a lot of peace of mind on move-out day.
Quick checklist before you sign
| Check | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Agency | Is it a licensed, registered office? |
| Deposit | Any heavy mortgages on the building’s registry? |
| Special terms | Did you actually translate and read every line? |
| Photos | Timestamped shots of existing damage, taken on day one? |
| Proof | Did you send those photos to your landlord right away? |
Something needs fixing after move-in?
If you’ve recently settled into a place around Yongin, Suwon, Dongtan, or elsewhere in Gyeonggi-do and you’re noticing a few small things that need attention — a boiler controller acting up, a door lock that sticks, a leaky faucet, blinds that won’t sit right — that’s exactly the kind of thing I handle. English-friendly, straightforward, no drama.
Service areas: Yongin, Suwon, Dongtan, and nearby Gyeonggi-do
Contact:
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