5
# Chapter 5
The finger scrolling the mouse wheel suddenly stopped.
Kim Mingwan stared blankly at the three emails displayed on his monitor. Taking a sip of lukewarm water from his mug, he slowly read through the messages. They were replies from the trust companies and asset management firms where he had submitted his résumé just before resigning.
[Thank you for applying. Unfortunately, we regret to inform you that we will not be proceeding with your application during this recruitment process.]
The first and second emails were ordinary rejection notices. They were mechanical responses sent by the HR department after conducting a background check.
The problem was the third email.
[Dear Applicant Kim Mingwan. Following an internal review, we have been informed that you had a history of failing to follow appraisal standards at your previous workplace, Taesung Appraisal Corporation. Therefore, the interview process has been suspended indefinitely.]
"So, I failed to follow appraisal standards?"
Mingwan let out a short, hollow laugh.
He had never been referred to a disciplinary committee, and on paper, his voluntary resignation had been perfectly clean, with no issues whatsoever. Yet the fact that such a specific reason had been given during the document screening stage at another company made the meaning obvious.
Taesung Appraisal Corporation's campaign to damage his reputation had already spread throughout the industry.
'They must have been pretty bitter about letting me go without being able to discipline me.'
Instead of getting angry or feeling wronged, Mingwan moved the mouse and closed his inbox. Wasting emotional energy on it would not change anything. Since Taesung, the industry's number one company, had openly thrown mud at him, finding a normal job in this field would be impossible for the time being.
But he could not simply sit around doing nothing.
He opened a new internet window and placed a real estate auction website and a property listing page side by side.
"In the end, I have no choice but to get my hands dirty with my own money."
The total amount of funds currently available to him was eighty million won, including his severance pay and savings.
If he pulled out every possible loan, he could aim for larger properties, but Mingwan did not believe in taking on debt based on unconfirmed profits.
He entered a maximum purchase price into the search filter.
Low-priced plots on the outskirts of the metropolitan area, particularly those that could somehow be accessed by public transportation. He quickly went through dozens of pages of listings, comparing the officially assessed land values, recent transaction records, and ownership details.
Properties tangled up in unnecessary mortgages or those manipulated through fractional ownership were immediately eliminated. After wrestling with the monitor for two hours, exactly three plots remained as candidates.
Mingwan copied the addresses into his notepad and immediately stood up. Taking only his wallet, measuring tape, and smartphone, he left the studio apartment.
The intercity bus heading toward the outskirts of the metropolitan area was nearly empty.
After getting off near the terminal, Mingwan took a taxi to his first destination. The tall buildings outside the window gradually disappeared, replaced by scattered factories and plastic greenhouses.
"Please drop me off in front of the convenience store after that three-way intersection."
After getting out of the taxi, Mingwan opened the map on his smartphone and went looking for the vacant lot that was his first candidate. It was an ordinary undeveloped plot located slightly inward from the roadside.
He looked around the area once before pressing the call button on his smartphone.
"Hello, I'm calling about the property listed online. The asking price here is considerably higher than the actual transaction prices."
The blunt voice of a real estate agent came through the receiver.
"Oh, the owner says they absolutely won't lower the price. It's basically take it or leave it, so we're having a headache with it, too."
"I see. Understood. Thank you for your time."
Mingwan ended the call without hesitation. The land was priced twenty million won higher than recent actual transaction prices in the surrounding area. Although the advertisement described it as a distressed sale, the atmosphere at the site was completely different. After taking a picture of the land, he drew two lines through the first address in his notebook.
The second candidate was another twenty minutes away on foot.
It was a field situated halfway up a low hill. However, the retaining wall connecting the field to the road below had a long crack running through it. The wall was also bulging severely, and it was in such poor condition that it would not have been surprising if it collapsed as soon as the rainy season arrived.
Mingwan squatted down and carefully examined the cracks.
"If I rebuild this retaining wall, I'll have to pay for the concrete, hire an excavator, and cover the demolition costs... It would easily cost more than twenty million won."
No matter how cheap the purchase price was, if the necessary construction costs were just as high, there would ultimately be nothing left to gain. It was a property where he could not expect any profit from the difference in purchase and sale prices. Mingwan left after taking a picture of the place.
Putting down a deposit simply because something was cheap was something only amateurs did.
By the time it was past three in the afternoon, he arrived at the third candidate.
It was a small miscellaneous plot of land abandoned far away from even the village road. Although several days had passed since it rained, puddles had formed all over the land, with stagnant, rotten water collected in them. The drainage was completely inadequate, and only weeds had grown thickly across the property.
Mingwan did not care about mud splashing onto his trouser cuffs. He walked steadily inside the boundaries marked on the cadastral map.
After stopping in the middle of the property, he caught his breath and began carefully examining his surroundings.
That was when it happened.
His blurred vision cleared, and transparent layers of information began to overlap across the dreary plot of miscellaneous land.
What appeared before his eyes was not an illusion. The land's current value and hidden context were being converted into numbers and striking his retinas.
[Current Value: 47 million won ~ 53 million won]
[Main Causes of Depreciation: Poor Drainage and Ground Subsidence]
[Hidden Utilization Category: Combining with Adjacent Parcels]
Mingwan's gaze shifted toward one corner of the land. In the direction he was looking, a faint arrow-like indication shimmered toward the neighboring plot. It was intuitive information suggesting that the value would increase if the two properties were combined.
But that was all.
He could not see how much the construction costs required for the combination would be, whether the neighboring landowner was willing to sell, or what the final price would be after merging the two properties.
Mingwan stepped backward and moved outside the land's boundary.
The layers of information filling his vision disappeared as if they had been washed away. Only the original muddy plot remained. When he stepped inside the boundary again, the same numbers and directional indication appeared without fail.
"So it's not some magic wand that tells me construction costs or other people's true intentions."
Mingwan muttered calmly.
All he could see was the land's current value range, the causes reducing its value, and the direction toward a solution. Even that information was visible only when he came to the site and stood within its boundaries. The intentions of other people and the results of legal approvals were completely excluded.
In the end, it was entirely his responsibility to verify the clues revealed by this vision using real-world data and find a way to resolve the problems.
He estimated the depth of the water collected in the puddles and the difference in elevation between the ground and the road, which was about one handspan lower. Then he turned around.
He had no intention of hastily purchasing the property simply because he trusted what he saw.
By then, the sun had set, and a chilly evening breeze was blowing.
After returning to his studio apartment, Mingwan took a shower first and threw his muddy trousers into the washing machine. He took a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator and gulped it down before sitting at his desk and turning on the computer.
"All right, let's check."
He displayed the third candidate's certified land register, land-use planning confirmation, and topographic map on the monitor one after another. Then he accessed the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's actual transaction price system and gathered all the recent transaction records in the area.
The sound of his fingers striking the keyboard steadily filled the small room.
Mingwan opened an Excel spreadsheet and sorted the sales records of nearby plots with similar drainage conditions.
"Lot 470 sold for forty-six million. Lot 502 sold for fifty-four million."
The value range of 47 million to 53 million won that he had seen within the land's boundaries during the day matched the nearby actual transaction prices with chilling accuracy.
Next, he enlarged the cadastral map and examined the adjacent plots indicated by the faint directional sign. After clicking to open the ownership information, a quiet sigh escaped his lips.
"There's no solution if things are like this."
The neighboring property was not a single parcel. It had been divided into small shares among no fewer than seven owners. To make matters worse, two of them were registered under clan association names, making their contact information difficult to obtain.
Searching for all of them and securing their consent to combine the properties or purchasing their shares was practically impossible.
The information revealed by his vision was accurate. The cause of the depreciation was correct, and combining the properties was indeed the solution.
But there was one fatal problem.
"The current asking price is sixty-two million won, but the maximum value is fifty-three million. That means it's a loss-making investment from the beginning."
Mingwan closed the Excel spreadsheet without mercy.
No matter how good the proposed solution was, he could not make a profit if the purchase price had already exceeded the property's maximum value. Protecting his funds was his top priority. He opened his notebook and drew a large X over the third address as well.
All three places he had checked that day had been failures.
But there was no impatience on Mingwan's face. It was a sense he had developed during nine years at Taesung, comparing hundreds and thousands of documents with actual sites. Good properties did not simply appear all at once.
He opened the property search window again.
This time, he completely changed the conditions. Instead of land with a proper road attached, he searched for perfect landlocked plots without access roads, where construction permits could not be obtained. Among them, he began filtering out problematic properties that had remained unsold for a long time and whose prices had fallen to rock bottom.
Land that others would spit on after seeing nothing but its defects. But if he could identify the hidden utilization category within those properties and resolve the bottleneck caused by the lack of a road, the profit from reselling would be certain.
After struggling with the mouse wheel for quite some time, Mingwan found three landlocked plots that met his conditions.
"These are the ones for tomorrow."
He turned on the printer and printed the cadastral maps and boundary maps of the three plots. Pointing at the printed pages with a ballpoint pen, he calculated the bus routes and walking order, planning the most efficient route.
After folding the printouts in half and placing them between the pages of his notebook, Mingwan stood up.
When he turned off the light, the streetlamp outside the window cast a soft glow across the vinyl flooring. He would have to cover himself in dust and dirt again from early tomorrow morning. But confirming the value of his own land with his own feet was a hundred times better than writing reports that forcibly inflated someone else's profits.