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The remand settles no liability. It orders the Busan District Court to work out what the rent should have been first, which turns a landlord's pricing discretion into an evidentiary fight it has to fund.
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The bench also cited a second ratio, and it is worth reconstructing. Korean commercial leases carry a deposit alongside the monthly rent, and a converted-deposit comparison turns the flow into a stock: convert monthly rent at a hundred times (my assumption, not something the ruling spells out) and B's 2018 package of a 100 million won deposit plus 6 million a month comes to 700 million, while the 500 million deposit plus 20 million a month put to the incoming tenant comes to 2.5 billion [3][6][5], which reproduces the figure in the judgment [9]. The method matters less than the fact that the court ran the arithmetic rather than accepting that it could not be run.
The quote the court flagged was a markdown on the landlord's own opening position, since A had asked the sitting tenant for 24 million a month, 400% of the 2018 rent [4][3], and the 20 million later put to C came in 16.7% below that [4]. Set that against what A was playing for: an uplift of 14 million a month, or 168 million a year [1], against a premium contract worth 2.2 billion [5], which is about nine years of the rent A hoped to collect from C [6]. A won the possession point at both lower courts [8]. Whether it has since let the unit at 20 million does not appear in the ruling.
The 2.2 billion is a price that an outgoing tenant and an incoming one agreed to, each for reasons of their own. The damages that might flow from it are a separate value, and that value depends on what the Busan District Court decides an appropriate rent and deposit would have been [10], a figure nobody has ever paid. That distance between those two numbers is what the remand will decide.
So the remand branches. If the court finds market rent for the unit sits near 20 million, the demand stops being markedly excessive, B recovers nothing, and the Supreme Court's intervention reads as case management. If it lands somewhere in the middle, obstruction can be found while damages are assessed against a counterfactual, and 2.2 billion becomes a ceiling rather than a claim. A third version: the court fixes an appropriate rent, finds the gap material, and every subsequent landlord discovers that the quote it gives an introduced tenant is a document an appraiser will be asked to grade.
The durable part of the ruling is evidentiary rather than substantive. The lower courts held that they could not determine an appropriate rent and therefore never reached obstruction [8]; the Supreme Court told them to determine it and then decide [10]. The counter-thesis is that the valuation burden still sits with the tenant, expert appraisal of a single retail unit is not free, and a tenant who has already handed back the space [8] has thin incentive to fund years of it. What would prove the thesis wrong is a remand judgment that examines the question, shrugs, and dismisses for want of proof anyway.
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
The Supreme Court's first division, with Justice Cheon Dae-yeop as presiding judge, overturned a lower court ruling that had dismissed a damages suit filed by a tenant identified as B against a landlord identified as A, and sent the case back to the Busan District Court, according to legal circles on the 30th.
A landlord who demanded more than triple the existing monthly rent from a prospective new tenant, causing the lease talks to collapse, may be found to have obstructed the outgoing tenant's recovery of a commercial goodwill premium, the Supreme Court ruled.
B signed a lease with A in 2018 with a deposit of 100 million won and monthly rent of 6 million won.
In April 2023, A asked to raise the monthly rent to 24 million won, but the two sides failed to reach an agreement.
B signed a 2.2 billion won goodwill premium contract with a prospective new tenant identified as C and introduced C to A.
A demanded a deposit of 500 million won and monthly rent of 20 million won from C, those negotiations broke down, and after the premium contract between B and C was terminated B sued A for damages.
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en.sedaily.com
1 article · August 29, 2026
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One outlet, no docket
Every number that matters here — the 100 million won deposit, the 6 million won rent, the 24 million won ask, the 500/20 quote, the 2.2 billion won premium — reaches us through a single report by Sedaily's English service, attributed to legal circles rather than a published judgment. The internal consistency is genuinely reassuring: 20 against 6 gives the court's 333%, and the standard 100-multiplier conversion reproduces its 357% exactly, which is not the kind of thing that survives sloppy transcription. What is absent is everything external — no case number, no ruling text, no second report, nobody named on the record.
Nothing downstream yet
A remand is a beginning. Nothing in this reporting tells us when the Busan District Court will hear the case, what appropriate rent it might settle on, or whether other courts, appraisers or lease negotiators have started behaving differently. We decline to invent uptake for a ruling whose only observable effect so far is that one file moved back down a level.
The ratio outruns the holding
333% is doing more work in the headline than it does in the judgment. The court expressly said the gap between old and new terms cannot by itself establish that an amount is markedly excessive — it said there is considerable room to so find, and then told Busan to determine the appropriate rent first. Sedaily hedges correctly with 'may have blocked', so the overstatement is small and lives in the framing: a reader scanning the number could leave believing a tripled quote is now presumptively unlawful, when what actually changed is who has to prove what.
Live case, unnamed channel
The stakes are lopsided and documented: the tenant is chasing a 2.2 billion won premium, the landlord was chasing 168 million won a year. That tells you who benefits from this version of events circulating, and the account surfaces through unnamed legal circles while the matter is still pending before the Busan District Court. No one is quoted, both parties are initials, and there is no sign the reporter saw the judgment rather than a summary of it.
Solid on what, thin on how far
We can describe what the court did with reasonable comfort — the procedural posture is clear, the quotations are specific, the figures reconcile. We cannot check them against a judgment, cannot see the remand, and cannot say how far this reasoning travels beyond one Busan storefront. That is enough to brief a lease negotiation and not enough to assert liability or a new rent ceiling.