Seoulscapade

Part of the crowd at the resident’s meeting.

A community meeting was held last week to discuss the matter of the gangster building company, Hanjin, and its continuing attempts to rob future residents like us involved in the Haemoro apartment complex. The manoeuvrings involve Hanjin’s trademark dirty tactics and coercion techniques.

A decision was made at that meeting to have another meeting today, Saturday, January 17, ‘09, to vote on proposals to fight back. In the picture above the very welcome results are being announced.

In an earlier post, I detailed the latest scheme Hanjin had to ensure hefty profits and lump all risk and liability on the residents. The company is still pursuing this scheme. To recap it goes like this:

1. As the larger apartments are more expensive, the are harder to sell. They’re over a million dollars. So, Hanjin will reduce their price by 20%. However, the cost for doing that is to be borne by residents. That amounts to around $50,000 extra per person.

2. In the event that an apartment is not sold, then residents have to cover 100% of the cost of the apartment. That cost would be on top of the costs for the 20% apartments. As I said, the large apartments will be expensive. Hanjin might even discount the apartments further to sell them, in which residents would have to cover more of the shortfall.

3. Residents are not allowed to upgrade into or purchase the discounted larger apartments themselves.

4. Hanjin wants to manage all of the money matters for the complex.

Now, none of the residents are in favor of any of these. Who would be!? What they all want is to get rid of Hanjin altogether, and of course Daemyung will go as well. (The issue of Hanjin building half of the complex and Daemyung building the other is now irrelevant.)

All work as stopped at the site.

The community managers are currently liaising with reliable building companies to see who is interested in taking over. Everyone would love Ramion (pronounced “Lamion”; a part of Samsung) to take over. That’d boost the value. But even Daelim would be good, and as Ramion is unlikely we’re rooting for Daelim.

What Hanjin did this week, however, was set up a call center to contact residents and persuade them to its side. It is using scare tactics to convince people not to reject its scams, saying they will lose out with another building. It has even prepared a video about how they will lose by not sticking with Hanjin. My wife got a call from them this week and she gave them the Korean version of “thanks but no thanks.”

Word has it that Hanjin is also calling companies that may be solicited and warning them they will lose money if they take over the project.

So, today we got to the meeting late. That didn’t matter, though. We got there in time for the announcement of the vote kick Hanjin out! Hanjin had put on it’s video and presumably no one was impressed. We were sorry we had missed. It would have been a good laugh.

As we were late, my wife couldn’t vote but she had already allowed the committee to vote on her behalf. And the result, well, around 96% of residents wanted to take out Hanjin. Everyone cheered when that was announced.

The Haemoro gates with a big clock, top left, that says time has run out for Korean gangsters, Hanjin.

The question now, however, is, What will Hanjin do about it, apply more gangster tactics? If they ask for money from the incoming builder, no doubt they’ll jack up the price and try to make a profit. If they decided to go to court, it will be a protracted affair, and I guess the site will remain dormant.

We heard from future residents at the end of the meeting who got up to voice opinions and ask questions. One guy pointed out that if the committee had voted for LG right at the beginning instead of Hanjin, everything would have been built by now. Apparently, when the committee voted on that some years ago, Hanjin won by just 1 vote.

Another guy got up and announced that he’d bought his apartment in 2002. He’s been waiting for 7 years! It makes our little kind of insignificant. His anger about it all must be four times ours.

Well, let’s see what Hanjin does next…