Blocked drain in a Korean rental: tenant or landlord?

The short answer: it depends where the blockage is

Forget the shouting for a moment and look at the pipework. A Korean apartment or villa has two different kinds of drain, and they are treated very differently when the bill arrives.

• Inside your unit — the trap under your sink, the bathroom floor drain, the toilet, the short branch pipe that runs from your fixture to the wall. A blockage here is normally treated as the tenant's cost, because it is caused by everyday use: hair, food waste, cooking oil, wet wipes.
• The shared vertical stack — the main pipe that several households drain into, running down through the building. A blockage here is normally treated as the landlord's or the building's cost, because it is part of the building's fixed equipment and no single household caused it alone.

The practical test is simple: is anyone else affected? If your kitchen sink alone is slow, it is almost certainly your branch. If your floor drain backs up when the neighbour upstairs runs a washing machine, or if several fixtures in your unit go slow at the same time, the problem is very likely in the shared stack.

In Korea the general principle people work from is that significant repairs to the building's structure and fixed equipment sit with the owner, while small day-to-day maintenance arising from ordinary use sits with the occupant. That is a rule of thumb, not a formula — your lease can say something different, and it comes first.

Why camera diagnosis settles it

The reason this argument drags on is that nobody can see inside a pipe. The tenant says the pipe was already bad, the owner says the tenant poured oil down the sink, and neither side has anything to show. It becomes a contest of confidence rather than evidence.

An endoscope camera ends that. We push the camera down the line and watch on the monitor where the water stops and what is holding it. You see it live, at the same time we do. If the camera reaches the branch and finds a plug of hardened cooking grease two metres from your sink, the responsibility is obvious. If the camera travels past your branch, reaches the vertical stack and finds it choked with material that did not come from your kitchen, that is equally obvious — and it is the sort of thing a building office acts on quickly once someone shows it to them.

We record the footage and give it to the customer to keep. It is your recording of your pipe: forward it to the owner, the agent or the management office as you like.

The order to contact people

Do these four things in order. It takes about ten minutes and it is what makes the difference between a reimbursed invoice and an argument you lose.

1. 1Stop using water in the affected fixture. Every extra flush or wash adds to what has to come back out, and if it overflows onto a floor the conversation changes from a drain bill to a water-damage bill.
2. 2Photograph and film it. Wide shot of the room, close shot of the fixture, and a short video of the water not draining. Timestamped photos on your phone are the cheapest evidence you will ever collect.
3. 3Message the landlord or agent in writing first — KakaoTalk or text, not a phone call. You want a record that you reported it, when you reported it, and what you said. If they approve the work in that chat, you are covered.
4. 4If it genuinely cannot wait, call someone out — but get the estimate in writing before work starts, and forward it to the owner or agent in the same chat thread before you approve it. 'I am calling someone now, here is the quoted amount' is a very different message from an invoice that arrives afterwards.

Jeonse, wolse, officetels and buildings with a management office

The plumbing logic does not change, but who you talk to does.

• Wolse (monthly rent): you deal with the owner, usually through the agent who arranged the lease. The agent is often the fastest route because they want the relationship to keep working.
• Jeonse (large deposit, no monthly rent): the same principle applies, but owners are typically more involved in repairs to the fixed equipment since the deposit is returned at the end and both sides care about the condition of the unit.
• Officetels: these usually have a building management office, and the drain stacks are firmly building equipment. Report anything that looks like a shared-stack problem to the management office before you call anyone yourself.
• Any building with a management office (관리사무소): if the symptoms point to the shared stack, the management office is the first call, not the second. They may already have other complaints from the same stack, and in many buildings they arrange and pay for that work directly.

If you are not sure which category your problem falls into, describe the symptoms to us on KakaoTalk with a photo before you contact anyone. We will tell you which one it most likely is so you knock on the right door first.

The bilingual report we issue

A verbal explanation in Korean, relayed by a tenant in English, convinces nobody. So we issue a written report covering the job, in English and Korean side by side.

• Photographs of the fixture and the affected area before and after
• The endoscope footage showing where the blockage was and what it consisted of
• A written description of the work performed and the equipment used
• The amount charged

You can forward that document straight to your landlord, your agent or the management office without translating anything. Request it on KakaoTalk before the visit and the technician will have it ready to complete on site.