The lease of the apartment

I'd rented a condo for one year in San Diego. As the condos are usually reserved for temporary dewelling just during the vacation in Korea, it came to me a little bit awkward to lease the condo for everyday life. The condos seem one of the most spread dewellings places for usual lives in the United States.

Besides, interestingly, apartments of the Unites States are run by the real estates companies, and the whole apartments belong to the company. The deals took place over these properties are usually the leasing between the landlords(company) and tenants. On the contrary, the ownership of apartments in Korea are not the big company, but individuals. It is the same that a big housing company construct the apartment complex, but those apartment are sold to the individuals before being finished. After all, each apartment's owernership is transferred to each different individual. Unlike the United States, all deals including of buying and selling, let alone the leasing are made up between individually different landlords and the tenants.

In addition, Korean payment of renting is just one-time deposit of the houses, which is supposed to be paid at the time of moving in. Apart from the rent, Americans also ask the tenants to put the deposit as much as one month rent, but Korean deposit commonly reaches up to 70% of houses values. Very expensive. Still, instead, we have no monthly rent to pay. This big amount of deposit is all we have to pay for rent. As a matter of course, the landlord should return the deposit to the tenant when the contract expires. Seemingly, the tenant have nothing to lose except for the loan interest, for the deposit would be back to the tenant in two years. In the Unites States, we have pay the rent every month that it feels like losing money. :(