Land Plots with Unknown Owners: Causes and Legal Measures—The Necessity for a Thorough Reduction of Transaction Costs

The increase of land plots with unknown owners, namely, land plots whose owner’s name and address are not easily identifiable through repeated inheritance, etc., has emerged as a prominent social issue. The major reason for this phenomenon is the Civil Code that unconditionally allows the sharing of real estate by an unlimited number of co-owners, for one thing, and the registration system of real estate that does not require the true owner to register and thus does not show the real rights of real estate, for another. To reduce the increase of land plots with unknown owners as a proactive measure and to utilize them as a reactive measure, it is necessary to establish the one-owner principle with a ban of the sharing of real estate even through inheritance, to abolish fixed asset tax on buildings and houses, to require the new owner of real estate to register the right upon the transfer of ownership and for the registration office to make it public, to amend the Land Expropriation Act to facilitate the purchase of the land plots for public purpose without owner identification, to create an institutional arrangement that allows the will of the owner to be fictionally replaced, and to amend the Civil Code to allow the disposal of shared real estate by the majority of the co-owners.