Land Merger Possible Even If Landowners Have Different Addresses

Regulation Relaxation to Enable Without Visiting the Registry Office

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport announced on the 17th that the revised Enforcement Decree of the "Act on the Establishment and Management of Spatial Information" easing regulations to allow land consolidation even if the landowners have different addresses will take effect from the 19th.

The cadastral register records and manages information about land such as location, area, and land category, and in Korea, all land is registered and managed in the cadastral register.

Until now, if landowners had different addresses, to apply for land consolidation, they had to visit the registry office responsible for the land location and change the registration to the current address to unify the addresses before consolidation was possible.

For example, if 'Hong Gil-dong' wants to consolidate land purchased while residing in Gangwon-do in the past with land purchased while currently residing in Gyeonggi-do, he had to unify the address on the registry copy to his current Gyeonggi-do address before land consolidation was possible.

With this revision, if it can be confirmed that the owners of the land to be consolidated are the same person, consolidation will be possible without a separate address change registration.

Land consolidation requires the landowners to be the same person, so under the related law, the landowners' addresses had to be identical at the time of application to recognize them as the same owner, which restricted land consolidation.

This was criticized for causing unnecessary inconvenience to the public. Since the cadastral register records the landowner's registration number, it is possible to confirm the same person even if the addresses are registered differently by checking the address change history through the registration number.

This revision of the enforcement decree allows local governments to confirm that the landowners are the same person by checking the address change history through the landowner's registration number, enabling land consolidation. As a result, applicants for land consolidation can apply without visiting the registry office responsible for the land location.

Once registered in the cadastral register, land continuously changes in size and use through 'land movement' procedures such as land division, consolidation, and land category changes, totaling about 320,000 cases annually.

Among these, 'land consolidation' is an administrative procedure to merge two or more parcels into a single parcel for unified land management. Approximately 60,000 applications are submitted annually, such as consolidating small parcels for development activities or managing properties scattered across multiple parcels.

Kang Ju-yeop, Director of Land Information Policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, said, "The previously cumbersome land consolidation process has become simpler, which is expected to increase public satisfaction with administrative services," and added, "We will continue to identify and ease regulations that cause difficulties in exercising property rights related to the cadastral system."