Register index

Brokerage office in KR

What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.

BGrade
JurisdictionSouth Korea
TradeBrokerage office
AuthorityMunicipal and provincial authorities, via data.go.kr
GradeB  Bulk machine-readable export, unsigned
Checked10 November 2026
01

What was found

Abundant and fragmented in the same breath. Seoul publishes its brokerage offices as a daily CSV of more than twenty-five thousand records under an open licence allowing commercial use and modification, carrying registration number, office name, trading name, status, and the start and end dates of administrative sanctions. Sanction dates inside the bulk file is something almost nobody else does. Provinces and districts publish their own REST APIs through the national portal, free, some of them real-time, behind a service key that is auto-approved for development and reviewed for production. The catch is that there are hundreds of these publishers and the cadence is whatever each one chose: daily in Seoul, annual in one district whose file carries 323 rows. One more thing is worth watching. Responding to the lease-deposit fraud wave, Seoul has said it intends to publish detailed business information about practising agents so that risky ones can be identified, and to do it with the agents’ consent. Consent-based enrichment of a public register, for fraud prevention, is tier C of RVW-5 arrived at independently.

02

What it publishes

CheckAnswerWhy it matters
A public page per licenceYesGives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against.
A bulk exportYesLets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it.
Machine readableYesA CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all.
SignedNoMakes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it.
03

The next step

Sign the file

The export exists and is machine readable, which is the expensive part. What remains is a key and one DNS record on a domain the authority already controls, which makes the file impossible to forge and takes this row to grade A.

A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.

If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.

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