Full Report

What a Korean real estate trust company actually sells

A Korean 부동산신탁회사 (real estate trust company) sells a legal container. Under the Trust Act, a settlor transfers legal title in a property to a trustee, which then manages, develops, or disposes of that property for the benefit of a named beneficiary and takes a fee for doing so [1]. Nothing about that is unique to Korea. What makes it an industry is that the trustee must hold a licence: real estate trust is a category of financial investment business under the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act, licensed and supervised by the Financial Services Commission under a single licence unit, 4-121-1, covering movables, real property, and real-property-related rights [1].

The economic organising principle follows from the transfer of title. Once the land sits in the trust, the Trust Act separates it from the bankruptcy estate of both the settlor and the trustee, and Article 22 bars compulsory execution against it. That gives the structure four functions the filings name explicitly: custody of development cash so pre-sale proceeds cannot be diverted, bankruptcy remoteness for the land and building, dispute mediation among the parties to a development, and conversion of the property into divisible, tranched beneficiary certificates [2].

So the customer buying a trust is rarely buying property management. A developer buys credibility with a lender; a lender buys a controlled disbursement account and an enforceable security route; an apartment buyer paying instalments years before completion buys protection against the developer failing. The trust company is paid by the developer or landowner, usually out of pre-sale receipts, but the party whose comfort actually closes the deal is the project-finance lender.

Price is a function of how much risk the trustee absorbs

The industry publishes its price list. Korea Asset In Trust's base fee schedule shows the whole logic of the business in one table: the same building, the same trustee, and a fee that moves by seven times depending on who is on the hook for the construction money.

Source: FY2025 Annual Report, II. 사업의 내용 — 기본보수 산정 기준 및 요율 [3]. Rates are the published base schedule; actual contracts are negotiated.

The filings describe the two ends of that ladder in the same terms. A loan-type land trust is the arrangement in which the trust company directly raises the construction cost, carrying funding risk in exchange for a larger fee; a management-type trust leaves funding with the settlor or contractor, so the trustee has no advance at risk and earns correspondingly less [4]. The competing listed trust, KOREIT, words it the same way and adds the consequence: in loan-type work the trustee bears loss risk on money advanced in its own name [5].

The collateral trust sits at the other end and earns 0.2%, because it competes against an alternative that costs nothing to the trust industry — a conventional mortgage. The filings set out why lenders pay anyway: a collateral trust needs no pre-attachment to exercise subrogation, is not caught by the debtor's rehabilitation proceedings, is realised by the trust company's own public tender rather than court auction, and blocks the priority that wage claims would otherwise take [4].

Where the assets sit and where the money is made

Two different scales are quoted for this industry and they measure different things. Assets under trust (수탁고) is trust principal accepted; operating revenue is fees plus interest. The filings warn that the correlation between the two is low, because each trust type prices off a different base [6].

Scope: Korean real estate trust business only, as at 31 December 2025, sourced by both listed trusts from the Korea Financial Investment Association. Assets under trust ₩560tn in total, of which ₩457tn at the dedicated trust companies [6] [7]; operating revenue, licensed-company count and headcount [8] [9].

Banks, securities firms, and insurers may also act as real estate trustees, but only for the passive products. Of the ₩560tn of real estate trust assets outstanding at the end of 2025, banks held ₩89.9tn, securities firms ₩7.9tn, and insurers ₩4.6tn — and none of them held a single won of land trust or pre-sale management trust, both of which sit entirely with the 14 dedicated companies [6]. Development work is the licensed specialists' preserve; the banks compete only where the trust is a security wrapper.

Within the specialists, the split between where assets sit and where fees are earned is stark.

Source: derived from the FY2025 Annual Report tables of assets under trust by type [6] and industry trust fees by type [8]. Fee yield is the ratio of the two; the filings caution that trust principal is not the fee base for every product.

Land trust is 23% of the assets and 80% of the fee pool. Collateral trust is 74% of the assets and 19% of the fees. That ratio is the industry's central fact: the passive, growing, low-risk book generates roughly 3 basis points of fee on assets, while the development book generates roughly 44. Every strategic argument inside these companies is about how far up that gradient to climb.

The profit pool along the development chain

Source: assembled from the product and fee descriptions in the FY2025 Annual Report [3] [4] [10], and the HUG-guaranteed redevelopment disclosure in the contingent-liability note [11].

Two features of that chain matter more than the rest. First, the trust company's fee is charged on pre-sale proceeds, so revenue is recognised over the life of a project — the filings put the conversion of a signed mandate into revenue at three to four years [9]. Orders won in a boom therefore land as revenue into a downturn, and orders lost in a downturn hollow out revenue years later. Second, in redevelopment and completion-guarantee work the trustee stands behind other parties' performance, which converts a fee business into a contingent credit business. That is the industry's principal structural conflict, and the last four years are a live test of it.

The arena: fourteen licensed companies, and what they earn

Fourteen companies hold the licence. Four date from the 1990s, seven from the 2000s, and three were licensed in 2019 — 대신자산신탁 in July and 신영부동산신탁 and 한국투자부동산신탁 in October [8]. None of them is a REIT; all are supervised financial institutions.

Sources: operating revenue, fee income, staff and fee per head for FY2025, Korea Asset In Trust FY2025 Annual Report [9] [12]; equity and net income on a separate-financial-statement basis at 31 December 2025, KOREIT FY2025 Annual Report [13]. Share is derived from operating revenue.

Five of the fourteen lost money in 2025, and the losses are not small relative to the capital behind them: Woori Asset Trust lost ₩220.6bn against ₩239.4bn of equity, Kyobo ₩149.6bn against ₩358.9bn, and Mugunghwa ₩93.3bn against ₩25.1bn of remaining equity [13]. Capital, not revenue, is what separates the companies now — and the two largest capital bases, KOREIT at ₩892.9bn and Korea Asset In Trust at ₩867.2bn, belong to firms with mid-table fee income.

Fee productivity per employee ranges from ₩577m at KB to ₩148m at Shinyoung, against an industry average of ₩352m [9]. This is the metric the filings themselves propose for comparing competitiveness, on the reasoning that fee income is a return on people rather than on assets, and that interest income should instead be read against each firm's equity [9]. One caution: the equivalent table in the FY2021 filing ran on operating revenue rather than fee income, and its column totals ₩1,605.0bn rather than ₩909.5bn, so the two vintages of "fee per head" are not comparable [14].

The 2019 licences reshaped the share table

Source: derived from the industry market-share tables for 2017-2021 [14] and 2021-2025 [12]. Top-4 is the four largest companies by operating revenue in each year; entrants are Daishin, Shinyoung, and Korea Investment, all licensed in 2019.

In 2017 the four largest companies took 60.5% of industry revenue and the incumbent leader, Korea Asset In Trust, took 20% on its own [14]. By 2025 the top four took 43.5% and the three companies licensed in 2019 took 10.8% between them [12]. Two effects are tangled here and the filings do not separate them: new licences added supply into a market that stopped growing, and the ranking also churned for reasons of ownership — Asia Trust, sixth by revenue in 2021, appears in the 2025 table as Shinhan Asset Trust and leads it. The record of who took share from whom belongs to Competition; what the arena shows is that a licensing decision made in 2019 is still redistributing revenue in 2025.

The industry's revenue changed character, not size

Sources: 2017-2021 from the FY2021 Annual Report industry table [15]; 2021-2025 from the FY2025 Annual Report industry table [8]. Both are compiled from Korea Financial Investment Association filings on a separate-financial-statement basis.

Industry operating revenue in 2025, at ₩1,664.1bn, was 3.7% higher than in 2021 and 4.0% below the 2022 peak [8]. On the top line, nothing much happened. Underneath, the composition inverted. Trust fees fell 43% from ₩1,039.5bn in 2022 to ₩589.6bn in 2025, and land-trust fees specifically fell from ₩894.4bn to ₩468.6bn. Over the same three years, interest on loans to trust accounts rose from ₩103.4bn to ₩388.9bn — 3.8 times [8].

That second line is not a new product. Interest on trust-account loans accrues when the trust company advances its own money into a project that cannot fund itself — either because the structure always required it, as in loan-type land trust, or because something went wrong. Revenue of that kind grows fastest when projects stall. Industry-wide, roughly ₩1 in ₩4 of 2025 operating revenue was interest on the industry's own advances into the schemes it manages, against ₩1 in ₩16 in 2022.

A caveat on these tables. Both listed trusts publish the same Korea Financial Investment Association series, and their versions disagree in places: 2024 trust fees are ₩784.8bn in the Korea Asset In Trust filings and ₩764.8bn in KOREIT's, and the itemised fee lines do not always sum to the fee-income total shown above them [8] [16]. The series is self-reported and revised; differences of one or two percent between filings should not be read as signal.

The structural conflict: a fee business that guarantees other people's performance

Three of the industry's products put the trustee behind a third party. In loan-type land trust the trust company funds the build. In completion-guarantee management trust, it promises to finish the building if the contractor fails and to compensate the lenders if it cannot. In HUG-guaranteed redevelopment trust, the standard agreement makes the trust company, as project implementer, the party carrying the completion obligation [11].

Korea Asset In Trust named the risk in its FY2022 filing, writing that as the risk of project-finance distress widened, the risk factors in completion-guarantee products came into focus, because a contractor falling behind schedule or a long unsold period increases the trust company's exposure [17]. The size of that exposure, and its subsequent unwind, is disclosed year by year.

Sources: FY2022 and FY2023 columns from the FY2023 Annual Report contingent-liability note [18]; FY2024 from the FY2024 note [19]; FY2025 from the FY2025 note [11]. Completion-guarantee sites are the 책임준공토지신탁 line; the total adds HUG-guaranteed and other redevelopment trust obligations.

At the end of 2022 one company stood behind ₩1,126.5bn of drawn lender debt across 25 projects, of which 18 were completion-guarantee sites carrying ₩600.5bn [18]. By the end of 2025 the same disclosure covered five projects and ₩126.3bn [11]. The intervening year shows what the obligation means in practice: at the end of 2024 one of the seven remaining sites had passed its contractor's completion deadline, with ₩80.3bn of loans outstanding against it, and the trust company had applied for temporary occupancy approval on part of the building to meet its own deadline [19].

The obligation is disclosed but not provisioned. The filings state each year that the loss cannot be reliably measured and so no amount is recognised, with the exposure monitored project by project instead [11]. Where a completion promise is actually performed, the money appears elsewhere — as advances (대지급금) inside the loan book.

Where the exposure lands on the balance sheet

The visible cost of the cycle shows up in loans to trust accounts. At the end of 2025 Korea Asset In Trust carried ₩802.6bn of gross trust-account loans against ₩161.2bn of allowance — 20.1% — up from ₩819.1bn against ₩107.8bn, or 13.2%, a year earlier [20]. These claims are not unsecured lending in the ordinary sense: the filings note that trust-account loans and advances are recoverable from the trust estate under the Trust Act's expense-reimbursement right [21]. Recovery therefore depends on the project selling, which is the same variable that determines the fee.

Source: FY2025 Annual Report, 재무건전성 — 자산건전성현황 and 고정이하자산비율 [22]. Classification is of consolidated assets subject to soundness classification, and the filings note that trust-account loans are conservatively classified using project balance, sales rate, and construction progress.

Two constraints bound how far this can run. Regulation 3-26 of the Financial Investment Business Regulation requires a type-3 financial investment business to hold a net operating capital ratio of at least 150%, and Regulation 3-41 requires a real estate trust company to hold a won liquidity ratio of at least 100% [23] [24]. Korea Asset In Trust reported 363% at end-2025, having dipped to 284% at end-2024 [23] [24]; KOREIT reported 230.1%, down from 306.3% two years earlier [25]. The prudential ratio is what converts a bad property cycle into a binding limit on how much new development work a trust company may write.

Where the industry sits in its cycle

The filings' own framing is that real estate trust follows the property cycle, but not simply. Recessions reduce the volume of development while raising the demand for the safety features the trust structure provides — so the industry describes itself as exposed to both quantitative and qualitative swings in property activity [2]. That claim has held up in an uncomfortable way: assets under trust at the dedicated companies rose every year from ₩342.4tn in 2021 to ₩457.5tn in 2025 while trust fees fell 43% from the 2022 peak [6] [8]. Volume grew; price and mix collapsed.

The outlook language in the filings moved in three steps. In FY2021 the development market was described in terms of domestic policy to cool an overheating property market and externally rising protectionism [26], and continued demand for loan-type land trust was expected regardless of property-market volatility [15]. In FY2024 it was a global rate-tightening cycle contracting the market [27]. In FY2025 it is project-finance distress and macro uncertainty together, with loan-type land trust described as affected by weakened investment sentiment [2].

The transmission mechanism is set out plainly in the same filing's divisional review: through 2025 the trust industry faced slowing property activity, a contracting project-finance market, and rising construction costs; development starts fell and pre-sales at some sites were delayed, which cut trust and management fees while the deteriorating soundness of trust-account assets pushed provisions up [36]. The forward risk named there is specific — the workout and recovery of provincial loan-type land trust projects may run slow, with government-led court and public auctions gradually restructuring distressed sites while non-capital-region and non-residential uncertainty persists [36].

This is not the industry's first shakeout. The two trust companies that ran Korea's land-trust market in the 1990s — Daehan Real Estate Trust, later renamed Koret Trust, and Korea Real Estate Trust — were both wound up, and Korea Asset In Trust was built in 2001 out of the assets, staff, and systems it acquired from them [28]. The mechanism that killed them was the same one visible in the loss column today: a development trust that funds construction is a lender to a property market, and in a bad enough market a lender to a property market can lose its capital. What differs this time is that the losses are concentrated in the smaller and newer licensees rather than the largest.

Three currents to carry into the other tabs

The fee pool is migrating from greenfield development to redevelopment

Both listed trusts are writing more of their new work in 정비사업 — reconstruction and redevelopment of existing estates, opened to trust companies by the 2016 amendment to the urban-maintenance law, under which the trust company acts as the scheme's operator or agent in place of the owners' association [29].

At Korea Asset In Trust the shift is a four-year trend: redevelopment land-trust fees contracted rose from ₩4bn in 2022 to ₩43bn in 2025, while conventional loan-type mandates fell from ₩38bn to ₩16bn.

Source: 1Q 2026 investor presentation, Trust business — contracted trust and REITs fees [30]. Contracted fees are amounts agreed in the year, recognised as revenue over the following three to four years.

KOREIT's disclosed order mix moves in the same direction but far more erratically, which is itself a feature of the industry: individual mandates are large enough that a single year's mix says little.

Source: KOREIT FY2025 Annual Report, 사업군별 수주비중 추이 (5개년) [31]. Other covers management-type land trust, non-land trust, consulting, and agency work.

The economics of the switch are set out in the fee card: redevelopment trust prices at 2.5% of pre-sale proceeds against 0.5% for plain management-type work, and the trustee carries operator obligations rather than funding risk [3]. Redevelopment schemes also run on long approval clocks, so the fees contracted in 2024 and 2025 sit several years from recognition.

Revenue is becoming more interest-like and less fee-like

The industry earned ₩388.9bn of interest on its own advances into trust accounts in 2025, against ₩589.6bn of trust fees [8]. At Korea Asset In Trust specifically, trust-account interest was ₩51.5bn in 2025 against ₩41.4bn of land-trust fees — the interest line is now the larger of the two [32]. Two readings of the same number are available and the evidence does not yet separate them: interest that accrues on a performing loan-type project is contracted return on capital deployed, while interest accruing on a stalled project is an accounting entry whose cash realisation depends on eventual sales. The 20.1% allowance now carried against the trust-account loan book is the company's own estimate of how much of that balance will not come back [20].

The property recovery is regional, and the trust book is not

Management's own account of 2025 draws the line explicitly: the capital region recovered gradually while the non-capital regions where its main project sites are concentrated kept a high share of unsold housing, deepening a regional split that delayed sales and impaired project viability [33]. For 2026 the same filing expects a full market recovery to stay limited, citing rate volatility, possible changes in government housing policy, and rising construction costs, while stating that provisioning taken across 2024 and 2025 should ease further credit costs [33]. The stated strategic response — diversify regions and products, tighten underwriting on loan-type land trust and other high-risk categories, and push into redevelopment and non-land trust — reads as the same response the whole industry is attempting [34].

What the evidence here cannot settle

Three limitations are worth carrying forward rather than glossing.

There is no independent market-size series. Every figure above traces to the Korea Financial Investment Association's member filings, republished by the trust companies themselves, and the two listed trusts publish versions that differ in detail [8] [16]. There is no third-party market study in the record.

Only one listed pure-play comparable exists. Of the six companies in this run's automatically assembled peer set, KOREIT is the only other listed Korean real estate trust; LF Corp and Hana Financial Group are listed holders of Koramco Asset Trust and Hana Asset Trust rather than trust companies themselves, SK D and D is a developer, and Hulic and TOC are Japanese property companies retained from the 2016 IPO valuation screen [35]. Peer economics in this tab therefore come from the two Korean trusts' own filings, which disclose all fourteen licensees, rather than from the listed peer set.

Product-level profitability is not disclosed anywhere. Korea Asset In Trust's management discussion splits operating profit between its trust division and its capital-finance subsidiary [36], and KOREIT declares three divisions but reports only one because trust exceeds 90% of revenue [16]. Neither breaks profit out by trust product, so the margin on land trust against collateral trust against REIT management cannot be observed — only revenue by product. The fee-yield table above is the closest available substitute, and it is a revenue measure, not a margin.

Neither can these records fix the boundary between contracted return and deferred loss inside the interest line, nor date the trough of the fee cycle. Those are questions for the chapters, which have the company's quarterly record and the analyst estimates to work with; this tab records the arena they take place in, and History records how this particular company arrived in it.

---

The arena and the evidence base

Korea Asset In Trust competes inside a closed regulatory perimeter. Only companies holding a Financial Services Commission trust licence under authorisation unit 4-121-1 may accept real-estate trust mandates, and at the FY2025 reporting date there were fourteen of them, KAIT included [1]. Two of the fourteen are themselves listed pure-plays: KAIT and Korea Real Estate Investment and Trust (KOREIT, 034830). The rest sit inside banks, financial holding companies, insurers, a securities house and a fashion group. That structure is what makes the competitive record here unusually legible — every licensee files the same regulator-collected fee and revenue data, and both listed pure-plays reprint it, so the whole field can be read from primary filings rather than estimated.

Three things follow for this tab. First, the head-to-head numbers below are the licensees' own submissions to the Korea Financial Investment Association, reproduced in KAIT's and KOREIT's annual reports — not a vendor screen. Second, KOREIT is the only rival for which a full like-for-like income statement, trust-fee book and order-mix disclosure exists in this corpus, so it carries most of the comparative weight. Third, three of the six staged comparators run different business models; they are described in their own section and kept out of the like-for-like economics.

Arena structure, value-chain economics and the property cycle belong to Industry; the raw document shelf is Competitors. What follows is the comparative record. Korean filings are quoted here in translation; each citation opens at the original passage.

Who overlaps where

Korean real-estate trust is not one market. It is a set of licensed products with very different economics, and rivals cluster differently across them. KAIT publishes a headline fee-rate card that separates them explicitly: borrowing-type (development) land trust is charged at 3.5% of pre-sale proceeds, trust-format redevelopment at 2.5%, completion-guarantee land trust at 1.5%, management-type land trust at 0.5%, and collateral trust at 0.2% of the beneficiary-certificate limit [2]. A seven-fold spread between the top and bottom product means the mix of mandates a firm wins matters more than the count.

Sources: KAIT fee-rate card and product descriptions, FY2025 annual report [2]; KAIT trust books by product [3]; KOREIT product lines and order mix [4], [5]; SK D and D business description [6].

The licensed products divide into two economically distinct groups. Collateral trust, pre-sale management trust and management-type land trust are compliance infrastructure — KAIT's own filing describes the non-borrowing products as goods that "must be used" to execute a property project, on the strength of the Trust Act's bankruptcy-remoteness provision [7]. They are near-universally supplied and priced at 0.2% to 0.5%. Borrowing-type land trust and trust-format redevelopment are the opposite: capital-intensive, restricted in practice to firms with equity to lend into the trust account, and priced at 2.5% to 3.5%. Where a firm sits on that split is the competitive question the numbers below answer.

Share of sector operating revenue, 2017–2025

The single most complete competitive series in the corpus is the fourteen-company operating-revenue table that KAIT reprints every year from the Financial Investment Association's disclosure site. Chained across the FY2021 and FY2025 annual reports it runs nine years.

Sources: derived from the licensee operating-revenue tables in KAIT's FY2021 annual report (2017–2021) [8] and FY2025 annual report (2021–2025) [9]; "2019 entrants" is the sum of Daishin Asset Trust, Shinyoung Real Estate Trust and Korea Investment Real Estate Trust. Figures are separate-financial-statement basis.

KAIT entered the window as the largest firm by operating revenue, at 19.5% of the sector in 2017, and exits it at 8.8% in 2025 — the smallest share it has recorded in the series. The path is not a smooth decline: revenue held at roughly ₩200bn to ₩219bn through 2020, dropped to ₩167.8bn in 2021, recovered to ₩209.1bn in 2023, then fell in each of the two following years to ₩146.3bn [8][9]. The sector's revenue pool, by contrast, grew from ₩1,032bn to ₩1,664bn over the same nine years. Share was lost to a larger pool, not only to a smaller numerator.

Two mechanical drivers are visible in the table. The Financial Services Commission licensed three new trust companies in 2019 — Daishin (July 2019), Shinyoung and Korea Investment (both October 2019) [1]. Their combined share went from 0.3% in 2019 to 10.8% in 2025. Across the full nine years KAIT's share fell 10.7 points. Separately, the licensee that appears as Asia Trust in the FY2021 report appears as Shinhan Asset Trust from FY2022 onward, carrying the same August 2007 establishment date; that platform went from 5.5% in 2019 to 11.8% in 2025, the largest gain of any incumbent.

The fourteen licensees, FY2025

Sources: operating revenue and share from KAIT FY2025 annual report [9]; fee income, headcount and fee per head from the same report [10]; equity and net income from KOREIT's FY2025 annual report [11]. All separate-financial-statement basis; original units of ₩100m converted to ₩bn.

The table separates three facts that are usually conflated. On revenue KAIT ranks fifth. On fee income it ranks seventh of fourteen, at ₩61.7bn against Hana Asset Trust's ₩104.1bn, KB's ₩97.0bn and KOREIT's ₩97.9bn — the firm collects roughly 60% of the leader's fee income [10]. On capital it ranks second, at ₩867.2bn against KOREIT's ₩892.9bn, and holds 16.1% of the fourteen firms' combined ₩5,373bn of equity while earning 8.8% of their operating revenue [11].

On profit the sector's condition is the context for everything else. Five of the fourteen licensees lost money in 2025 on a separate basis — Woori at negative ₩220.6bn, Kyobo at negative ₩149.6bn, Mugunghwa at negative ₩93.3bn, Korea Trust at negative ₩84.3bn and KB at negative ₩78.7bn. Summed across all fourteen, the industry recorded a net loss of ₩468.2bn for the year. KAIT's ₩25.4bn was the second largest profit reported, behind Koramco's ₩46.3bn [11]. Mugunghwa Trust, on ₩25.1bn of equity, carried a ₩93.3bn loss.

Fee productivity per employee

The trust companies' own productivity yardstick — fee income divided by headcount — is published for every licensee each year on the same basis from FY2022 onward.

Sources: per-licensee fee-income and headcount tables, KAIT FY2022 [12], FY2023 [13], FY2024 [14] and FY2025 [10] annual reports. The FY2021 report's version of this table is populated with operating revenue rather than fee income, so the series starts in 2022.

KAIT's fee per head fell from ₩573m in 2022 to ₩388m in 2025, a 32% decline; the sector average fell 25% over the same span. The firm ran ahead of the sector average in every year and remains above it in 2025, but the gap narrowed from 23% to 10%. KB and Hana, both bank-owned, sit at ₩577m and ₩539m. KAIT reduced headcount from 208 to 159 across the four years, a 24% cut against the sector's 13%, which is why the ratio held up better than the fee income did [12][10].

KAIT against KOREIT, like for like

KOREIT is the only rival in this corpus that files a full pure-play trust income statement, a trust book by product and an order mix. The two firms are the sector's two largest capital bases, at ₩867.2bn of equity for KAIT and ₩892.9bn for KOREIT on a separate basis. KOREIT states in its own filing that it is "the company with the largest capital among the fourteen trust companies now in existence" and that it has "occupied a leading position in the industry for many years" on operating revenue, contract scale, operating know-how and manpower [11].

Sources: KAIT consolidated results and trust book by product, FY2025 annual report [3] and 1Q 2026 earnings release [15]; KOREIT summary consolidated financials [16] and trust book by product [5]. Yields derived from those two tables.

Three years of data move the two firms past each other on the fee line. In 2023 KAIT earned ₩95.4bn of trust fees against KOREIT's ₩76.6bn. In 2024 KOREIT passed it. By 2025 KOREIT earned ₩68.8bn against KAIT's ₩48.5bn — 42% more trust fee on a trust book less than half the size, ₩10,344bn against ₩22,630bn [3][5]. Narrowed to land trust alone, KAIT earned 0.39% of its land-trust principal in fees in 2025 against KOREIT's 1.23%, a gap that widened from 1.7 times to 3.2 times in two years.

The gap needs a definitional caution before it is used. Trust principal (수탁고) is the contracted amount at inception, not a marked AUM, and the fee rate attaches to the product type, not the principal: a book weighted toward borrowing-type land trust at 3.5% will show a far higher yield than one weighted toward management-type at 0.5%. KAIT's ₩10,604bn land-trust book contains only about ₩2.2tn of borrowing-type work [9]. The yield gap is therefore a statement about mix at least as much as about price.

On the operating line the direction reverses. KAIT's consolidated operating income fell from ₩116.7bn in 2023 to ₩34.2bn in 2025 but stayed positive in all three years; KOREIT swung from ₩33.9bn of operating income in 2024 to a ₩20.9bn operating loss in 2025 [15][16]. The firm with the better fee line took the larger charge below it.

What rivals say about this turf

Statements below come from the rivals' own filings and calls, in translation where the original is Korean.

KOREIT: a record order year in 2025. KOREIT terminated part of a treasury-share trust in December 2025 and distributed 2,961,902 shares as a special employee bonus. Its stated reason: "this was in consequence of achieving the largest order intake in 2025" [17]. The award carries a four-year lock-up on the employee stock ownership association tranche, releasing after December 2029. KAIT's own new fee contracts also rose in 2025, from ₩69.9bn to ₩98.1bn, so both firms were writing more business into the same year [18][9].

KOREIT: moving away from borrowing-type land trust. KOREIT states it is "moving away from a business structure centred on borrowing-type land trust in order to diversify its revenue structure", naming REITs, urban-redevelopment work and corporate rental housing as the destinations [19]. Its disclosed order mix shows the swing: borrowing-type land trust ran at 27.6% of orders in 2021, 1.9% in 2023 and 35.6% in 2025, while urban redevelopment ran at 31.2%, 62.0% and 50.9% in the same three years [4].

KOREIT: two new adjacent permissions. KOREIT registered loan brokerage and arrangement as an ancillary business on 14 June 2024, giving as its reason that "the property market downturn that began in 2023 is becoming prolonged" and that it needed new revenue sources [20]. In August 2025 it registered a second: advisory and consulting on funding structures for property development projects, explicitly including bridge and project-finance structuring — senior/subordinate ratios, loan-to-value and drawdown conditions — pitched at project sponsors and borrowers [21]. That is adjacent to the arranging and consulting fees KAIT books under "other fees".

Hana Financial: no fresh capital for the trust arm. Hana Asset Trust is the sector's largest fee-income earner. Asked on the January 2026 call whether "for your capital and asset trust businesses, you might need more capital to expand into certain lines of business", Hana's Group CFO answered that non-bank invested capital is already about ₩14.5tn for a 12% contribution to group profit, framed the plan as "normalisation" rather than growth, and said: "we're thinking injecting capital just at a level required to meet the regulatory threshold for the insurance arm and that's pretty much it. Otherwise, we will focus more on driving organic growth" [22][23]. Borrowing-type land trust capacity is a function of equity available to lend into trust accounts, so the parent's capital-allocation stance bears directly on how far that rival can push into KAIT's highest-rate product.

Hana Financial: the property book is still being cleaned. On the October 2025 call Hana's Group CRO said Q4 credit costs would rise from Q3 levels "because we still have real estate PF to clean up", and added that for the following year the group expects "an upward trend in delinquency and NPLs" [24]. That is the lender side of the same project-finance market KAIT's trust accounts lend into.

LF Corp: real-estate finance carried the group, and the downturn was felt. LF, which holds Koramco Asset Trust inside its financial segment alongside Koramco Asset Management and LF Investment [25], told shareholders that "the slump in the construction and property sectors persisted" and affected LF's businesses generally, while crediting expansion of real-estate finance AUM and cost reduction for the group's ₩1,882.4bn of revenue and ₩168.1bn of operating profit [26]. Koramco was the most profitable trust licensee in 2025, at ₩46.3bn [11].

Posted rates versus realised fees

KAIT's published fee-rate card is identical in the FY2021, FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 annual reports — 3.5% for borrowing-type land trust, 2.5% for redevelopment, 1.5% for completion-guarantee and lease-type, 0.5% for management-type and agency, 0.4% for pre-sale management, 0.3% for disposal, 0.2% for collateral and management trust. The only change across five filings is that the residual line was relabelled from "consulting" to "other (consulting etc.)" [2][27]. KOREIT publishes an equivalent card for collateral-trust disposal work on a sliding scale by disposal price: 8 per thousand up to ₩100m falling to 4 per thousand above ₩1bn for a lump-sum disposal, with each tier one to two basis points higher on instalment terms [28].

Posted rates held; realised fees did not. The sector-wide land-trust fee pool and the sector-wide land-trust principal moved in opposite directions.

Source: sector fee and trust-asset tables reproduced in KAIT's FY2025 annual report from Financial Investment Association data [1], [7]; yields derived from those tables.

Across the fourteen licensees, land-trust fees fell from ₩894.4bn in 2022 to ₩468.6bn in 2025, a 48% decline, while the land-trust principal they hold rose 4.4% from ₩101,510bn to ₩105,959bn. Fee per unit of principal halved, from 0.88% to 0.44% [1][7]. Over the same window the sector's interest on trust-account lending rose from ₩103.4bn to ₩388.9bn. Sector operating revenue was almost flat — ₩1,732bn in 2022, ₩1,664bn in 2025 — because spread income replaced fee income [1].

Since posted rates did not move, the halving is a mix effect, a base effect, or both: pre-sale proceeds are the fee base for every land-trust variant, so slower or smaller pre-sales shrink the fee on an unchanged rate, and a shift from 3.5% borrowing-type work toward 0.5% management-type work shrinks it again. The filings disclose the rate card and the outcome but not the realised rate on individual mandates, so the split between those two channels cannot be closed from this corpus.

KAIT's own product-level numbers show the same shape at firm level. Land-trust fees fell from ₩92.0bn in 2023 to ₩67.5bn in 2024 to ₩41.4bn in 2025 while its land-trust principal rose from ₩9,961bn to ₩10,604bn; collateral-trust fees rose from ₩2.0bn to ₩6.2bn as that principal went from ₩7,404bn to ₩10,709bn — growth concentrated in the 0.2% product [3].

Trust-format redevelopment

Both listed pure-plays have redirected new business toward trust-format urban redevelopment, in which the trust company is appointed project implementer for a reconstruction or redevelopment scheme in place of the traditional owners' union. KOREIT describes the mechanism plainly: the trustee takes title to the land from the union, then finances and executes the project using Korea Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation loan guarantees or its own funds, reducing dependence on the construction contractor [19].

Source: KAIT Earnings Release for 1Q 2026, Trust business — contracted trust and REITs fees [29].

KAIT's redevelopment order intake went from ₩4bn in 2022 to ₩43bn in 2025, from 3% of new contracted fees to 44%. Conventional borrowing-type work fell from ₩38bn to ₩16bn over the same four years [29]. The disclosed pipeline stands at 22 named schemes — six on the trust-agency structure and sixteen on the trust-operator structure — covering 19,800 existing households to be rebuilt as 33,081, including Mok-dong blocks 9 and 11 in Seoul, Yeouido Sibum and Gwangjang, and Gwangmyeong Jugong 10 and 11 [30].

KOREIT ran 50.9% of its 2025 orders through the same channel [4]. Its redevelopment weighting is far more volatile than KAIT's — 62.0% in 2023 collapsing to 7.2% in 2024 and rebounding to 50.9% — which is consistent with lumpy, tender-by-tender competition rather than a steady book.

The other contested adjacency is REIT asset management. KAIT manages 18 live REITs with ₩5,124.8bn of assets and earned ₩4.1bn of AMC fees in 2025, up from ₩3.4bn in 2024; the single largest vehicle is the MDM REIT at ₩1,997.4bn, approved in 2024 [31]. REITs supplied 5.7% of KOREIT's 2025 orders against 34.3% in 2024 [4].

The 2016 baseline

The IPO documents fix where the field stood before the current cycle, which is the only way to read the share series above as movement rather than level. In 2015 KAIT held about 20% of sector trust order intake and roughly 30% of borrowing-type land trust orders, at ₩126.8bn out of a ₩419.1bn market; KOREIT held 38% of the borrowing-type market that year and 48% in 2014 [32][33]. The prospectus described borrowing-type land trust as work that only "some trust companies with capital, operating experience and risk-management systems" among the then eleven licensees could perform, and stated that KAIT recorded "a share of about 30% of the borrowing-type land trust market as at the end of 2015" [34].

Two structural things changed after that. The licensee count went from eleven to fourteen. And the redevelopment opportunity the prospectus was underwriting — it sized the sub-1,000-household reconstruction market at about ₩45tn [34] and projected trust companies taking 10% of it with KAIT taking 30% of that, for about ₩40.5bn of fees [41] — is the same channel both listed pure-plays are now competing in directly.

Switching, duration and contractual lock

Real-estate trust does not switch like a service contract, because the trustee holds legal title.

Sources: KAIT FY2025 annual report, trust concept and functions [35], market and outlook [7], fee-rate card [2], recognition period [9] and contingencies note [36]; IPO prospectus recognition description [32]; redevelopment appointment note [30]; KOREIT disposal-fee scale [28].

Three consequences for competitive dynamics follow from those terms. Contracts are project-length rather than renewable: a mandate ends when the development completes, so the field re-competes for every new project rather than defending a renewal. Order intake therefore leads revenue by three to four years — KAIT's ₩226.4bn of 2021 contracted fees, ₩124.6bn in 2022, ₩73.2bn in 2023, ₩69.9bn in 2024 and ₩98.1bn in 2025 sets the fee line for the years after each [37][38][39][18][9]. And winning the high-rate products consumes balance sheet: KAIT's loans to trust accounts ran from ₩224bn in 2022 to ₩819bn in 2024 before falling to ₩739bn at 1Q 2026, against six borrowing-type contracts written in 2025 on ₩1,883bn of total project cost [29].

A change in what the company claims as its advantage

The competitive-advantage section of KAIT's annual report is a stable text that changed once. Through FY2023 it stated that the company "refers to sales-viability and business-feasibility consulting reports prepared directly by affiliated companies when reviewing whether to accept a mandate", naming MDM and MDM Plus as the source of that development know-how [39]. From FY2024 that sentence is absent; the paragraph now rests on in-house specialist staff and internal process, funding and risk-management systems, while the group one-stop-service claim in the paragraph above it is retained [18][9]. The filings do not explain the deletion. It is recorded here because the affiliate-underwriting link is the differentiator most often attributed to this company, and the company itself stopped asserting it from the FY2024 report onward. The underwriter's 2016 assessment had rested on the same link, describing MDM's feasibility consulting as what gave KAIT a competitive edge over other firms in development-trust risk management [41].

Comparators used, and comparators set aside

Sources: KAIT fourteen-licensee table [1]; KOREIT self-description [11]; LF segment structure [25]; SK D and D business description [6]; Hulic and TOC selection recorded in the 2016 IPO valuation screen [33].

Two evidence limits are worth stating plainly. There are no KAIT earnings-call transcripts in this corpus — the company runs invitation-only institutional meetings using the quarterly deck, so no management answers on competitive dynamics exist to quote. And KAIT's and KOREIT's reproductions of the same Financial Investment Association data disagree slightly: 2024 sector operating revenue appears as ₩1,638.7bn in KAIT's filing and ₩1,639.5bn in KOREIT's, with 2024 trust fees at ₩784.8bn and ₩764.8bn respectively [1][40]. Differences of that order do not move the share picture, but the tables should not be treated as reconciled to the won.

---

The Record and Its Breaks

Korea Asset In Trust was incorporated in March 2001 as Kookmin Asset Trust, a wholly-owned vehicle of the state bad-bank KAMCO, and began operating one month later by absorbing twelve land-trust projects from the collapsed Koret Trust [1]. Four breaks define the twenty-five years since: the KAMCO carve-out and distressed-portfolio transfers of 2001–02; the change of control that moved the company from the state to Daishin and then to developer MDM and its founder Moon Ju-hyun in July 2011 [1]; the KOSPI listing on 13 July 2016 [2]; and the property-development downturn that took operating income from ₩146.9 billion in 2022 to ₩34.2 billion in 2025 [3].

This tab records what was said and what followed. One structural note about the sources: KAIT holds no earnings call and publishes no transcript, so every promise below comes from a filing, an IPO document, or one of the twelve quarterly investor decks in the corpus, which begin only in August 2023. For periods before that, the annual business report is the sole management-voice record. Who runs and owns the company today sits in People; the named-rival record sits in Competition.

Sources: FY2021 Annual Business Report, company history [1]; FY2025 Annual Business Report, listing status and share count [2] [4]; market capitalisation as reported at 7 August 2026.

The Arc in Dated Beats

The chronology below is taken verbatim from the company-history tables in the annual business reports. Two things are worth noting about the table itself. First, the FY2021 report listed thirty entries running to 2020; the FY2025 report lists seventeen and stops at the 2016 listing, dropping every capital raise, every stock dividend and the two subsidiary formations [1] [2]. Second, the FY2025 report states there was no change of control, no merger, no reorganisation proceeding and no change of principal business during its disclosure period [5].

Sources: FY2021 Annual Business Report, company history and subsidiary history [1] [6]; IPO prospectus, offering terms [7]; FY2025 Annual Business Report, board changes, treasury cancellation and bond record [5] [4] [8] [9]; news record for the 2024 bond attempt and the 2026 leadership change [10].

The controlling-shareholder table records the ownership sequence in full: KAMCO from 20 March 2001, Daishin MSB from March 2010, a Daishin private-equity vehicle from 11 July 2011, and MDM Co with Moon Ju-hyun from 12 July 2011 — a one-day handoff [11]. The related-party bloc around MDM has been added to and trimmed nine times since, most recently in April 2020 [11].

What the Company Earned

Reported revenue peaked at ₩259.1 billion in FY2023 and has fallen for two consecutive years, to ₩204.3 billion in FY2025. Operating margin fell in every year from FY2020 — 74.4%, 69.6%, 63.0%, 45.0%, 22.9%, 16.8% — a six-year compression with no interruption. Net income does not track it: FY2023 net income rose 19.8% to a record ₩129.6 billion while operating income fell 20.5%, and FY2025 net income rose 32.0% to ₩49.4 billion while operating income fell 33.9% [3].

Sources: 4Q 2025 investor presentation, six-year performance table [3]; 2Q 2023 investor presentation for FY2018–FY2019 [12].

Management publishes a second return measure alongside reported ROE: an adjusted ROE on a separate-entity basis that charges the year with the movement in the regulatory loan-loss reserve. The two series diverge sharply from FY2023. Reported ROE was 13.2% in FY2023 while adjusted ROE was 1.35%; reported ROE was 3.60% in FY2024 while adjusted ROE was negative [13] [14]. In FY2025 the relationship inverts: adjusted ROE of 9.51% against reported ROE of 4.64%, because ₩45.3 billion of the reserve built in FY2024 was scheduled for reversal [15] [16].

Sources: FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 Annual Business Reports, key management indicators [17] [13] [14] [15].

Management Said, and What Followed

The ledger below pairs each dated commitment with the outcome the filings later reported. Because there is no call record, the commitments are drawn from the IPO use-of-proceeds statement, the quarterly decks and the annual management discussion. Every row names the period the promise covered and the basis on which it was measured.

Sources: IPO prospectus use of proceeds [18] and issuance-results report [19]; 3Q 2023 investor presentation, funding plan [20]; 4Q 2024 investor presentation, shareholder-return note [21]; FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 management discussion [17] [13] [14] [22]; 1Q 2026 investor presentation [23]; FY2024 Annual Business Report, summary financial information for the borrowings figures [43]; news record for the Yeouido apology and bidding [10].

The trust-account loan balance is the clearest single test in that ledger, because the company put a number on it. In November 2023, with the balance at ₩441 billion, the deck stated a year-end figure of approximately ₩350 billion and described the 2023 funding plan as resting on the increase in equity [20]. The balance closed 2023 at ₩469 billion, reached ₩819 billion at end-2024, and stood at ₩739 billion at 1Q 2026 [24].

Sources: 3Q 2023 investor presentation for 2019–2021 [20]; 1Q 2026 investor presentation for 2022–1Q 2026 [24].

Asset quality moved with it. Assets classified substandard or below went from ₩80 billion in 2022 to ₩763 billion in 2024 and ₩711 billion at 1Q 2026, against total assets that rose from ₩1,364 billion to ₩1,740 billion over the same span. The allowance coverage ratio management publishes rose from 23% to 36% [25].

Source: 1Q 2026 investor presentation, asset quality condition [25].

Capital Allocation

The company has raised equity once as a public issuer, in 2016, and has never returned to the market for it. The IPO sold 27,297,345 shares at ₩10,300 for a gross ₩281.2 billion, but only 11,512,480 of those shares were newly issued: 57.8% of the deal was a secondary sale, and ₩162.6 billion went to selling shareholders rather than to the company [7] [26]. Net proceeds to KAIT were ₩116.9 billion [18]. KAMCO cut its stake from 18.51% to 6.40% in the offering; the employee stock ownership association took up 351,897 of the 5,459,469 shares reserved for it, or 6.4% of its allocation [27].

Sources: FY2021 Annual Business Report, company and subsidiary history [1] [6]; IPO prospectus and issuance-results report [7] [18] [19]; FY2025 Annual Business Report, bond record, use of proceeds, equity statement, treasury cancellation and reserve notes [28] [9] [8] [4] [16]; 1Q 2026 investor presentation, subsidiary results [29]; news record for the 2025 bond book [10].

The dividend record runs unbroken for eleven consecutive year-end payments covering 2015 through 2025 [30]. Its level is not unbroken. The cash dividend was ₩200 per share for FY2016–FY2019 alongside a stock dividend, ₩220 for FY2020–FY2023, ₩100 for FY2024, and ₩150 for FY2025 [12] [30]. Payout ratio rose as earnings fell, from 21% in FY2023 to 33% and 37% [3]. Total cash paid was ₩26.9 billion for FY2023, ₩12.2 billion for FY2024 and ₩18.4 billion for FY2025 [30].

Sources: FY2025 Annual Business Report, dividend history [30]; 2Q 2023 and 4Q 2025 investor presentations for the pre-2023 dividend and payout series [12] [3].

The Book the Company Was Winning

New fee mandates are the leading indicator management publishes, and the composition of that number changed more than its level. Total contracted fees fell from ₩226.4 billion in 2021 to ₩73.2 billion in 2023, then recovered to ₩98.1 billion in 2025 [31] [24]. Within the loan-type land trust line, conventional mandates fell from ₩38 billion in 2022 to ₩16 billion in 2025 while redevelopment mandates went from ₩4 billion to ₩43 billion — the recovery is entirely a mix shift [24].

Source: 1Q 2026 investor presentation, contracted trust and REIT fees [24].

The redevelopment pipeline the decks disclose grew through the downturn without interruption. Households in mandates at reserve-trustee stage or beyond went from 11,662 in August 2023 to 19,800 by May 2026, against a planned post-completion count that rose from 19,889 to 33,081 [32] [33]. The decks caution that the list excludes projects at consultation stage and that entries are subject to change [33]. Total trust assets under management, the other scale measure, moved much less: ₩19.4 trillion at end-2021 and ₩22.6 trillion at end-2025, with loan-type land trust assets inside it falling from ₩2.5 trillion to ₩2.2 trillion [31] [34].

Sources: 2Q 2023, 4Q 2023, 4Q 2024 and 1Q 2026 investor presentations, reconstruction project tables [32] [35] [36] [33].

How the Explanation Changed

The account management gave for the earnings decline moved through four distinct stages in four annual reports. The wording is worth setting side by side, because the cause named in each year is different and the sequence runs steadily inward, from world interest rates to the company's own geographic concentration.

March 2023, on FY2022: "the pandemic ended and private consumption was expected to recover, but only briefly; as global rate-hiking and domestic and overseas economic uncertainty spread, the domestic property market contracted rapidly." Net income was said to have risen 0.73% "as a result of the company responding pre-emptively to risk" [17].

March 2024, on FY2023: the year is described as one in which "successive defaults and bankruptcies of developers and contractors" raised fears of project-finance impairment. Net income rose 19.8%, attributed to dividend and interest income rather than fees, while adjusted ROE fell 8.22 percentage points to 1.35% [13].

March 2025, on FY2024: "a triple bind of interest-rate rises, worsening inflation and a construction slowdown." For the first time the report names the mechanism inside its own income statement: "the main reason for the decline in operating income is the increase in credit-loss provisions" [14].

March 2026, on FY2025: "the capital-region property market showed a gradual recovery, while the non-capital regions where the company's main projects are concentrated continued to carry a high share of unsold housing, and regional polarisation deepened" [22].

The industry-outlook section of the same reports moved on a different clock. Its opening sentence blamed household debt and the government's cooling measures plus rising trade protectionism in the FY2021 report [37]; then ran verbatim across three consecutive reports — FY2022, FY2023 and FY2024 all open "the property development market has recently contracted amid the global interest-rate hiking trend and the spread of domestic and overseas economic uncertainty" [38] [39]; and changed only in the FY2025 report, which for the first time named project finance in that sentence: "amid complex factors including the widening concern over project-finance impairment" [40]. One sentence in that section did not change at all across FY2022 through FY2025: that if the company applies its experience and risk-management capability in loan-type land trust well, it can create new opportunities even in a difficult environment [38] [40].

Sources: FY2021 through FY2025 Annual Business Reports, industry outlook and management discussion sections [37] [17] [13] [14] [22] [40]. Intensity is the writer's coding of whether a theme is absent, present or leading in that year's text.

Definitions That Moved

Three of the metrics a reader would use to track this record were redefined or restated during the period, in each case without a reconciliation note in the source.

Sources: 4Q 2025 and 1Q 2026 investor presentations, trust order tables [41] [24]; FY2024 and FY2025 Annual Business Reports, key management indicators [14] [15].

Where the Record Runs Out

Three gaps are worth naming, because chapters citing this tab will hit them.

The 2020–21 injections that took Korea Asset Capital's paid-in capital from ₩60 billion to ₩200 billion are recorded as dated events, but no return on that ₩140 billion is disclosed anywhere in the corpus [6]. The subsidiary's standalone results appear in the decks from 2023 onward — ₩7.7 billion of net income in 1Q 2026 on ₩471.2 billion of equity — but there is no bridge between the capital put in and the profit that came out [29].

The REIT book carries ₩5,124.8 billion of assets under management across eighteen funds, sixteen with approval years running from 2012 to 2024 and two still in progress. One of them, MDM REITs, is ₩1,997.4 billion, or 39% of the total [42]. The management fee that book has produced is shown only as a cumulative figure on the slide, never year by year.

And the ₩60 billion transferred from share premium to retained earnings in 2025 is recorded in the statement of changes in equity with no stated purpose, in the same year the company reversed ₩45.3 billion of loan-loss reserve and raised the dividend 50% [8] [16] [30]. Both movements pass through distributable earnings; the filings describe neither as related to the other.

---

Control and incentives, in one frame

Korea Asset In Trust has one class of shares, one voting bloc, and no equity compensation of any kind. The MDM group and its principals hold 54.24% of the votes and 54.24% of the economics — control and ownership are the same number here, which is unusual and simplifies the map [1]. What the map does not simplify is where the money reaches the top: management is paid in cash salary and cash bonus, while the controlling family is paid in dividends on a stake worth roughly ₩154bn at the 7 August 2026 close.

Three dated facts frame everything below. The board shrank from six directors to four at the March 2026 AGM, and the sole inside director now chairs it and runs the company [2]. Kim Kyu-chul, representative director since 2012, left at term expiry on 28 March 2026 after the longest CEO tenure in the sector [3]. And on 12 February 2026 the Financial Services Commission issued the company an institutional warning with a ₩174m administrative fine, alongside a dismissal-equivalent sanction on a former executive vice president who had already been convicted of taking bribes [4].

Who holds the votes

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, largest shareholder and related persons, base date 31 March 2026 [5]; FY2025 annual report, share distribution, base date 31 December 2025 [6]; FY2025 annual report, total shares outstanding [7].

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, largest shareholder and related persons, base date 31 March 2026, and MDM ownership (Moon Ju-hyun 95%, Min Hye-jung 5%) [8]; values derived at the ₩2,325 close of 7 August 2026 from company price data.

Moon Ju-hyun's look-through economics run to roughly 42.6% — 15.31% held directly plus 95% of MDM's 28.76% — before any account of MDM Plus, whose own shareholder register is not disclosed in Korea Asset In Trust's filings [9]. He has never held a seat on this board or any of its committees; the 2016 listing prospectus already described him as chairman of the group standing behind MDM [10]. MDM itself is a substantial operating company in its own right: ₩1,643.2bn of assets, ₩1,268.0bn of equity and ₩36.2bn of FY2025 net income on a consolidated basis [11]. Korea Asset In Trust is the only listed member of the 24-company MDM group [12].

Five years in which the bloc bought nothing and sold nothing

Sources: annual reports FY2021 [13], FY2022 [14], FY2023 [15], FY2024 [16] and FY2025 [17]; Q1 FY2026 quarterly report [18].

MDM has held exactly 35,200,618 shares and MDM Plus exactly 12,397,775 shares in every year from 2021 through the first quarter of 2026 [19] [20]. Moon Ju-hyun's personal line moved once in five years, by 260 shares, in 2022 [21].

The step from 53.62% to 54.34% in 2025 was therefore not a purchase. On 26 March 2025 the company cancelled 1,603,826 treasury shares carried at ₩12,562m, cutting shares outstanding from 123,977,752 to 122,373,926 — the filing states the year-end percentages moved because of that cancellation [22] [23]. The 0.10pp step back down in the first quarter of 2026 is the removal of Kim Kyu-chul's 120,580 shares from the related-persons table on his term expiry, not a market sale by the family [24].

No shares held by any member of the control bloc are disclosed as pledged or otherwise encumbered in any of the five annual reports. The only share-related collateral in the filings is a ₩50m deposit lodged with Korea Securities Finance against the employee stock ownership association's acquisition loan [25].

What a minority holder can and cannot do

Sources: FY2025 annual report, voting systems and voting rights, base date 31 December 2025 [26]; FY2025 annual report, AGM minutes summary for the 22nd through 24th meetings [27].

Cumulative voting is excluded, so a minority holder cannot concentrate votes to seat a director. With 54.24% in one aligned bloc, ordinary resolutions and director elections are decided before the meeting opens; the special-resolution threshold of two-thirds is the only vote the bloc cannot carry alone. The audit-committee director election is the one structural check Korean law supplies — the 3% rule caps each large shareholder's votes in that election — and the company's own board rules add that removing an audit committee member requires a two-thirds board vote [28]. Across the 22nd, 23rd and 24th AGMs the filings record no shareholder proposal and no dissent [29].

The board, and how it got smaller

Sources: board composition tables in the FY2021 [30], FY2022 [31], FY2023 [32], FY2024 [33] and FY2025 [34] annual reports, and the Q1 FY2026 quarterly report [35].

The board peaked at seven directors in 2023 and stands at four. At the 25th AGM on 26 March 2026, Choi Jin-young and Han Sung-hee were re-elected while Kim Kyu-chul and Lee Gun-ki reached term expiry on 28 March 2026 and were not replaced, taking the count from six to four and disclosed independence from 66.7% to 75% [36] [37]. Over the same window the outside bench turned over completely: Kim Chung-sik, Min Sang-ki and Song Kyung-chul all left in March 2024, Park Jae-young in March 2025, Lee Gun-ki in March 2026 [38] [39]. Of the three outside directors now serving, the longest has been on the board three years.

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, board composition and executive roster, base date 31 March 2026 [40] [41]; FY2025 annual report, audit committee membership and expert designation [42].

The audit committee is three outside directors, chaired by the only member designated an accounting or finance expert. Chair and CEO are the same person, and the annual report gives the reason plainly: expertise and efficiency in running the board [43]. Kwon Jun-hak carries the lead independent director designation [44].

Two facts sit alongside the disclosed independence designations rather than contradicting them. Choi Jin-young served as a non-standing adviser to Garip Accounting Corporation, a firm the company retains for advisory work; the filing states his committee duties are unrelated to that engagement [45]. And Song Kyung-chul, an outside director and audit committee chair until his mid-term resignation on 22 March 2024, appeared in the largest shareholder's related-persons table holding 6,413 shares throughout his tenure [46] [47].

Attendance, 2025

Sources: FY2025 annual report, board resolutions and attendance across ten meetings [48]; FY2025 annual report, audit committee activity across eight meetings [49].

The board met ten times in 2025 and the audit committee eight; the filings record every resolution as carried, with no dissenting vote by any director in either body [50] [51]. Outside directors received quarterly management briefings [52] and one external audit-committee training session, delivered in June 2025 [53].

Three board committees the company does not run

Source: FY2025 annual report, board committee composition and reasons for non-operation [54].

The exemption is size-based and the company states the threshold it is waiting on: it will establish the three committees once assets exceed ₩2tn or total trust assets exceed ₩20tn [55]. The practical consequence is that the same four-person board nominates its own members and sets its own pay within the ceiling shareholders approve, and that risk oversight sits in a management committee rather than a board one. The board's own regulations do reserve interested-party transactions, bad-debt write-offs above ₩1bn, and any acquisition or disposal above ₩1bn to full board approval [56] [57]. Compliance and risk management are combined in one officer, Min Chul-hyun, who serves as both chief compliance officer and head of the risk management division [58].

Operators

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, executive roster at 31 March 2026 [59]; FY2025 annual report, executive roster at 31 December 2025 [60]; FY2023 annual report, officer appointments effective 1 January 2024 [61].

The succession was internal and long-signposted. Shin Chan-hyuk joined in December 2015, rose through executive vice president to president, was elected an inside director at the March 2025 AGM, and took the representative-director role and the chair a year later [62] [63]. The one-year overlap as co-inside-director is the clearest handover the filings record.

Beneath him the bench thinned. Nine unregistered executives were in post at end-2024 and six at end-2025, with two retiring in August 2025 [64] [65]. Aggregate unregistered-officer pay went ₩3,432m across eight officers in 2023, ₩2,958m across nine in 2024, then ₩2,150m across six in 2025 [66] [67] [68]. Headcount followed: 203 employees at end-2022, 149 at end-2025 [69] [70].

Cho Hyun-bin is the only officer with a disclosed family connection to the controller — the filings record the relationship as 인척, a relative by marriage. He joined the officer ranks on 1 January 2024 as head of the management strategy office after six years as a general manager, and by end-2025 was running the corporate support division, which covers finance, planning and disclosure [71] [72]. He is 41 and holds no shares.

What the pay actually pays for

Sources: FY2025 annual report, individual pay calculation basis [73]; FY2023 annual report, top-five pay including monthly sales incentives [74]; FY2021 and FY2022 annual reports confirming no stock options granted or exercised [75] [76]; FY2025 annual report, share-based payment transactions with major shareholders [77].

There is no equity in the package, so the usual apparatus of strike prices, vesting schedules and hurdle tests does not exist here. Nothing vests, nothing is deferred, and nothing can be clawed back. The whole variable component is one cash bonus, sized by a payout rate set against the previous year's results.

Sources: individual compensation disclosures in the FY2021 [78], FY2022 [79], FY2023 [80], FY2024 [81] and FY2025 [82] annual reports.

Salary is a ratchet that stopped: ₩700m, then ₩800m, ₩800m, ₩830m, ₩830m [83] [84]. The bonus is where the operating cycle shows. It fell from ₩667m in FY2023 to ₩204m in FY2025, a 69% cut, over the same span in which operating margin went from 63.0% to 22.9% in the years those bonuses were measured against. The one break in the pattern is FY2023, when the bonus rose 35% on a prior-year margin that had fallen 6.6 percentage points [85] [86]. Because the payout is struck on the preceding year, the FY2025 bonus of ₩204m is the board's read on FY2024, not on FY2025.

Sources: board and employee compensation tables in the FY2021 [87], FY2022 [88], FY2023 [89], FY2024 [90] [91] and FY2025 [92] [93] annual reports; ratio derived from those two series.

The CEO-to-average-employee ratio has stayed in a band of 9.9x to 11.9x for five years — narrow by the standards of listed financials, and it narrowed further in FY2025 because the CEO's bonus fell faster than staff pay. Shareholders raised the director pay ceiling from ₩2.0bn to ₩3.0bn between 2021 and 2023 and have held it there; actual payments have run at 59% to 73% of the ceiling [94]. Outside directors averaged ₩54m in 2025, the lowest of the five years [95].

One design feature runs deeper into the business than the CEO line shows. Divisional heads are paid a monthly incentive struck on cash received when a mandate is won: in FY2023 that component was ₩157m and ₩193m for two executive vice presidents, on base salaries of ₩230m and ₩240m [96]. It pays on origination, while the completion-guarantee obligations those mandates carry sit on the company's balance sheet for years afterwards — a timing mismatch the disclosures state but do not address. How that guarantee exposure works is set out in Business.

How the controlling family is actually paid

Source: FY2025 annual report, dividend history for the 23rd through 25th fiscal years [97]; bloc share derived by applying the year-end control-bloc percentage to the declared total.

The FY2025 dividend of ₩150 a share totals ₩18,355m, a 37.2% consolidated payout and the eleventh consecutive year-end dividend since listing [98] [99]. Roughly ₩9,956m of it goes to the control bloc, of which Moon Ju-hyun's direct 15.31% holding alone collects about ₩2,810m — some 2.7 times the departing CEO's entire ₩1,037m FY2025 pay package [100] [101]. The controller's incentive here is the dividend and the buyback, not the pay table. The company also names the 2025 treasury cancellation as part of the same shareholder-return policy [102]. What that mix has meant for capital allocation over time belongs to History.

The related-party ledger

Sources: related-party transaction notes in the FY2021 [103] [104], FY2022 [105] [106], FY2023 [107] [108], FY2024 [109] [110] and FY2025 [111] [112] annual reports; percentages derived against reported operating revenue.

Related-party revenue has been a stable 4% to 6% of operating revenue for five years, and the 2016 listing prospectus put the same ratio at 5.85% for the first quarter of 2016 — the dependence is old and it has not grown [113] [114]. MDM Plus is the single largest counterparty every year, contributing ₩6,899m in FY2025 across trust contracts, interest income and advisory fees [115].

The balance-sheet side is the part that changed. Related-party receivables went from ₩5,564m at end-2022 to ₩83,779m at end-2023, and the whole step is a new loan to MDM Plus of ₩70,917m [116] [117]. That loan was drawn down to ₩51,000m by end-2024, then increased again by a fresh ₩6,000m advance in 2025 to ₩56,914m, carrying a ₩190m allowance [118] [119] [120]. A ₩10,000m loan to affiliate The M Retail was repaid in full during 2025, and ₩305m of loans to affiliate-company officers went to zero [121].

Two counterweights belong in the same paragraph. The flow runs both ways: MDM, MDM Plus and affiliate One Twenty Five PFV have given the company payment guarantees of ₩15,280m, ₩80,685m and ₩109,566m respectively against down-payment and interim-payment loans it extended to purchasers [122]. And the statutory disclosures on transactions with major shareholders report nothing at all: no credit extension, no asset transfer, no business transaction reaching 5% of revenue, and no share-based award, in the period from the start of the fiscal year to the filing date [123]. The MDM Plus loan sits below that threshold and is disclosed in the notes rather than in that section. Two board resolutions in 2025 — on 9 May and 19 December — were captioned "transactions between interested parties and the company" and carried unanimously [124].

Sources: FY2023 [125], FY2024 [126] and FY2025 [127] related-party notes.

Total key management compensation peaked at ₩7,022m in FY2023 and fell 24% the following year, tracking the reduction in the officer bench rather than a change in individual terms [128] [129]. Separately, ₩2,628m of housing and similar loans to officers and employees was outstanding at end-2025 [130].

Insider activity

Sources: largest-shareholder tables in the FY2022 [131], FY2024 [132] and FY2025 [133] annual reports and the Q1 FY2026 quarterly report [134]; treasury cancellation from the FY2025 annual report [135]; Kim Kyu-chul's disposal on retirement from Korean press coverage of the March 2026 filing [136].

Insider dealing here is close to non-existent. Across five annual reports the filings record no open-market purchase and no open-market sale by any controlling shareholder or director; every movement in the tables is an appointment, a retirement, or the treasury cancellation. The company also reports no short-swing profit events requiring disgorgement [137]. Employee stock ownership association holdings have drifted down from 0.43% in 2021 to 0.23% in 2025 [138] [139]. One other shareholder change is worth recording: Korea Asset Management Corporation, the state agency that founded the company in 2001, still held 5.72% at end-2023 and no longer appears in the 5%-holder table from end-2024 [140] [141].

Officer and regulator docket

Sources: FY2025 annual report, financial supervisory and other agency sanctions [142]; Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, sanctions status at 31 March 2026 [143].

The filings identify sanctioned individuals by office and length of service, not by name. Two points can be stated without inference. The representative-director office was held without interruption by Kim Kyu-chul from 2012 until 28 March 2026, so both the January 2024 caution and the May 2024 cautionary warning attach to the office he then occupied [144] [145]. And five separate regulatory actions in thirty-two months, three of them naming individual officers, is a dense record for a company of 149 employees.

Source: FY2025 annual report, sanctions footnote to the 12 February 2026 action [146].

The company's stated remedial steps are internal control reinforcement and training in each case, with fines paid and the January and May 2024 personal actions marked completed [147]. The two individual actions from February 2026 were still marked pending at the Q1 2026 filing date [148]. The compliance function that monitors officer and employee securities trading — the subject of the March 2025 reprimand — reports quarterly checks and rates every period "appropriate" [149].

Separate from the officer docket, the company carries a large but routine litigation load arising from its position as registered owner of trust property: 346 suits against it with a claimed value of ₩540,456m and 80 suits it has brought worth ₩141,172m at the end of the first quarter of 2026, none of which management considers capable of materially affecting the business [150]. The 2016 prospectus described the same structural feature, with a roughly 90% win rate on concluded cases and losses generally borne by trust assets rather than the company's own [151].

---

The numbers behind Korea Asset In Trust Co., Ltd.: as-reported financial statements and company metrics for FY2021–FY2025, traced to the source filings, opened with the share-price history those statements have to justify. Every linked figure opens the exact page of the filing it was printed on, with the statement row highlighted. Amounts in KRW millions unless noted.

Reading notes: All figures are the consolidated (연결) numbers for Korea Asset In Trust and its subsidiaries, principally Korea Asset Capital (한국자산캐피탈). The filings print every statement in whole won. Values here are converted to millions of won, so component rows can differ from a printed subtotal by up to one million; no sum-check blocks are attached for that reason. The citation anchor is always the figure exactly as printed in won. FY2021 and FY2022 are cited to the FY2023 annual business report rather than to their own reports. The FY2023 report restated both comparative years into the current line-item taxonomy (금융상품평가및처분이익, 신용손실충당금 전입액/환입액), and the balance-sheet page of the FY2022 report did not extract. Totals are unchanged in every case. FY2019 and FY2020 in the Long-Term Record are the comparative columns of the FY2021 annual business report; FY2016-FY2018 come from the standardized data feed and carry no page links. Total equity is not available for FY2016-FY2018.

Share Price — Available History Since April 2026

The stock closed at ₩2,325 on Aug 07, 2026 — down 12% over the window shown, trading between ₩2,065 and ₩2,765. At that close the stock trades at 5.8× FY2025 diluted EPS as reported below.

Source: market price feed, daily closes, Apr 2026–Aug 2026 — the feed marks this available history as partial. Price return only, excludes dividends.

Market capitalization ₩284.5bn.

Market cap = 122.4M shares outstanding × the Aug 07, 2026 close of ₩2,325. Market-derived, shown without filing links.

FY2025 at a Glance

Source: FY2025 consolidated statements [1] [2]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Operating Revenue by Source

Operating Revenue by Source	FY2021	FY2022	FY2023	FY2024	FY2025
Fee and commission income (수수료수익)	119,494	127,935	115,438	88,735	63,248
Gain on valuation and disposal of financial instruments (금융상품평가및처분이익)	15,419	9,019	20,514	13,207	24,323
Interest income (이자수익)	62,331	82,527	104,188	110,874	110,331
Reversal of allowance for credit losses (신용손실충당금 환입액)	11,494	4	—	—	—
Other operating income (기타영업수익)	3,789	13,479	18,931	13,631	6,386
Total operating revenue (영업수익)	212,527	232,965	259,072	226,448	204,288
Total operating revenue (영업수익) growth, derived	—	+9.6%	+11.2%	-12.6%	-9.8%

Source: Consolidated Statement of Comprehensive Income (연결 포괄손익계산서), operating revenue section. FY2021 and FY2022 are the reclassified comparative columns of the FY2023 annual business report. [1] [2]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Income Statement

Source: Consolidated Statement of Comprehensive Income (연결 포괄손익계산서) [1] [2]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Columns marked E are consensus analyst estimates from analyst consensus, shown alongside reported results for direct comparison; they are not company guidance.

Estimate source: analyst consensus (claude_web), as of 2026-08-09. Forecasts carry no filing page links.

Balance Sheet

Source: Consolidated Statement of Financial Position (연결 재무상태표) [3] [4]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Cash Flow

Source: Consolidated Statement of Cash Flows (연결 현금흐름표) [5] [6]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Fee and Commission Income by Trust Type

Fee and Commission Income by Trust Type	FY2021	FY2022	FY2023	FY2024	FY2025
Land development trust (토지신탁)	77,085	92,858	92,024	67,475	41,355
Management trust (관리신탁)	94	275	54	70	11
Disposal trust (처분신탁)	32	102	60	37	22
Collateral trust (담보신탁)	5,262	4,794	1,980	4,693	6,177
Pre-sale management trust (분양관리신탁)	1,081	1,068	1,242	1,210	906
Trust fees, subtotal (신탁보수 합계)	83,554	99,097	95,359	73,485	48,471
Agency service fees (대리사무)	7,119	11,405	9,894	6,886	6,595
Other fees (기타)	28,822	17,432	10,185	8,364	8,183
Total fee and commission income (수수료수익)	119,495	127,934	115,438	88,735	63,248

Source: II. Business — Results by Business Type (영업의 종류별 실적). FY2023-FY2025 printed in thousands of won in the FY2025 report; FY2021-FY2022 printed in millions of won in the FY2023 report. [7] [8] [9]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Long-Term Record

Fiscal year	Total operating revenue (영업수익)	Operating profit (영업이익)	Profit for the year (당기순이익)	Basic earnings per share (기본주당이익)	Net cash flows from operating activities (영업활동순현금흐름)	Total equity (자본총계)
FY2016	136,478	96,186	73,167	920	(102,357)	—
FY2017	222,485	166,803	126,725	1,350	(118,312)	—
FY2018	226,571	137,872	103,392	1,012	(168,618)	—
FY2019	223,264	114,071	88,753	725	(90,158)	661,107
FY2020	240,062	178,672	130,008	1,062	569,276	768,871
FY2021	212,527	147,926	107,461	878	(62,753)	849,261
FY2022	232,965	146,870	108,242	885	(5,439)	932,433
FY2023	259,072	116,706	129,642	1,059	(246,591)	1,035,048
FY2024	226,448	51,765	37,424	306	(325,727)	1,045,754
FY2025	204,288	34,227	49,382	404	203,263	1,083,326

Source: consolidated statements across filings; older years from the standardized feed [5] [1] [3] [6]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Operating KPIs

KPI	FY2021	FY2022	FY2023	FY2024	FY2025
Trust assets under management (수탁고, 신탁원본 기준)	19,441,492	21,150,559	18,707,430	19,480,214	22,630,207
Net operating capital ratio, NCR (영업용순자본비율)	516.7%	510.9%	370.0%	284.0%	363.0%

Source: company-reported operating metrics [10] [7] [11] [9]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Analyst Consensus

Street ratings: Effectively no live consensus. Only one broker covers Korea Asset In Trust (Hanwha Investment Securities, analyst Song Yu-rim): Buy, target KRW 3,100, published 2025-09-30 and not refreshed since. Buy/Hold/Sell = 1/0/0. FnGuide (WiseReport) as of 2026-08-07 explicitly reports no investment opinion issued within the last 3 months and leaves the 2026/12(E) consensus column blank; Naver Finance returns 추정EPS/추정PER = N/A with an empty research list; Hankyung Consensus returns zero reports for all of 2026. Note the discrepancy: Investing.com displays a mean 12-month target of KRW 3,600 (high 3,600 / low 3,600, 1 analyst, Buy), but that figure matches no dated broker report found on Korean sources and appears stale, so the verified KRW 3,100 from the primary PDF is reported here. Stock last closed at KRW 2,325 (2026-08-07), implying ~33% upside to the 3,100 target.

Estimate source: analyst consensus (claude_web), as of 2026-08-09. Forecasts carry no filing page links.

Traceability

428 of 443 figures on this page (97%) link to the filing page where they are printed — click a linked figure to open the source PDF at that page with the row highlighted. Unlinked figures come from standardized data feeds or pre-filing years.

• All figures are the consolidated (연결) numbers for Korea Asset In Trust and its subsidiaries, principally Korea Asset Capital (한국자산캐피탈).

• The filings print every statement in whole won. Values here are converted to millions of won, so component rows can differ from a printed subtotal by up to one million; no sum-check blocks are attached for that reason. The citation anchor is always the figure exactly as printed in won.

• FY2021 and FY2022 are cited to the FY2023 annual business report rather than to their own reports. The FY2023 report restated both comparative years into the current line-item taxonomy (금융상품평가및처분이익, 신용손실충당금 전입액/환입액), and the balance-sheet page of the FY2022 report did not extract. Totals are unchanged in every case.

• FY2019 and FY2020 in the Long-Term Record are the comparative columns of the FY2021 annual business report; FY2016-FY2018 come from the standardized data feed and carry no page links. Total equity is not available for FY2016-FY2018.

• Earnings per share is stated in won per share as printed. Basic and diluted are identical in every year: the company reports no dilutive instruments.

• Korean quarterly reports print a three-month column for Q1, Q2 and Q3 but never a discrete fourth quarter, and print cash flows on a year-to-date basis only. Q4 FY25 income-statement figures and all Q2-Q4 cash-flow figures are therefore exact differences of two printed cumulative figures and are marked as derived.

• The data feed for this run has no balance_sheet.json, so balance-sheet rows are taken entirely from the filings with no independent cross-check.

• 8 figure(s) differed between the data feed and the filing; the filing value is shown (see the run's metrics/metrics_tab.json for the audit trail).

---

Korea Asset In Trust Co., Ltd.'s management explains the business in its own materials. The slides below do the most of that work, pulled from the documents preserved in Sources. Each source link opens the complete presentation at that slide in a new tab.

Earnings Release for 1Q 2026 — 1Q 2026

The current edition of KAIT's only investor deck: trust and REIT operations, the earnings decline, and where it sits inside MDM group. · Open the full document →

Earnings Release for 3Q 2023 — 3Q 2023

The one long-form edition of the deck, carrying market history, land-trust project economics and demand drivers that later editions dropped. · Open the full document →

More from management

Earnings Release for 2025 — FY2025 · 20 pages · Full-year 2025 results on the same template — the annual figures sitting behind the current quarterly deck. · Open →

Earnings Release for 2024 — FY2024 · 20 pages · Full-year 2024, the year operating income more than halved and credit costs took over the story. · Open →

Earnings Release for 2023 — FY2023 · 20 pages · Full-year 2023, the last year of ₩100bn+ net income — the pre-downturn baseline this business used to earn. · Open →

---

Korea Asset In Trust Co., Ltd.'s annual reports contain management's most considered account of the business. These are the sections, passages and visual pages worth opening in the originals preserved in Sources.

한국자산신탁 — FY2025 사업보고서 (제25기 Annual Business Report) — FY2025

The latest annual filing, and the one that shows the full downcycle: fees halved, half of classified assets substandard-or-below, and the responsible-completion book run off. · Open the full document →

II. 사업의 내용 · 2. 영업의 현황 — p. 22 · Read the full section →

Management's own account of the franchise and of the trust products it sells, including the development-vs-management land-trust split.

How the trust business was assembled, from the 2001 licence to the group's one-stop property-finance model.

당사는 2001년 3월 20일 법인을 설립하고, 같은 해 4월 4일 (구)신탁업법에 근거하여 신탁업 인가를 취득한 후 업무를 개시하였습니다. 업무 개시 직후 대한부동산신탁(이후 코레트신탁으로 상호 변경, 현재 법인 청산) 및 한국부동산신탁(현재 법인 청산)으로부터 우량 자산(토지신탁 개발사업)과 인력, 전산설비 등을 양수하여 영업 기반을 구축하였습니다. […] 이후 주택 개발 등 토지신탁 사업과 담보신탁, 대리사무 등 비토지신탁 사업을 중점적으로수주하며 신탁 사업 영역을 지속적으로 확대해 왔습니다. 더불어 리츠(REITs) AMC, PFVAMC 등 다양한 부문으로도 진출함으로써 업무 외연을 넓혀 왔습니다. 또한 2012년 이후 캐피탈 등 금융 자회사를 설립하여 신탁ㆍ리츠ㆍ대출ㆍ투자ㆍ자산운용을 아우르는 부동산 금융 토탈 서비스를 제공함으로써, 종합 부동산 금융회사로서의 면모를 갖추게 되었습니다.

p. 22 · Read in context →

다. 영업의 종류별 실적 — p. 25 · Read the full section →

Trust assets and trust fees by product, three years side by side — land-trust AUM rose while land-trust fees fell from ₩92.0bn to ₩41.4bn.

5. 재무건전성 등 기타 참고사항 — p. 30 · Read the full section →

The regulator's own lenses on a trust company: net operating capital ratio, won liquidity, and the classified-asset table.

재무제표 주석 · 3. 중요한 회계정책 (수익인식) — p. 126 · Read the full section →

The policy that defines the model: land-trust fees are spread straight-line over the trust term, so bookings and revenue are years apart.

Land-trust fee recognition, and the separate performance obligation for responsible-completion duties.

토지신탁은 토지소유자가 토지를 효율적으로 활용하여 수익을 얻을 목적으로 신탁회사에 신탁을 하고 신탁회사는 자금의 조달, 건설, 임대, 분양 등을 수행하는 신탁으로당사의 수행의무는 개발사무관리와 분양사무관리로 각각 식별되나 두 수행의무 모두관련된 보수를 전체신탁기간에 걸쳐 정액법으로 안분하여 수익을 인식하며 기업회계기준서 제1115호 문단 22내지 23에 따라 하나의 수행의무로 식별합니다. 당사가 책임준공의무를 부담하는 관리형토지신탁은 책임준공이행기간과 전체신탁기간이 유의미하게 차이가 날 경우 당사의 책임준공의무와 관련된 보수를 별도로 식별하여 책임준공이행기간에 걸쳐 정액법으로 안분하여 수익으로 인식하고 있습니다.

p. 136 · Read in context →

8. 기타 재무에 관한 사항 · 나. 상각후원가측정금융자산 대손충당금 설정 현황 — p. 200 · Read the full section →

Shows exactly where the credit risk sits — trust-account advances (신탁계정대) are the single largest receivable and carry a 20% allowance.

IV. 이사의 경영진단 및 분석의견 · 2. 개요 — p. 208 · Read the full section →

Management's read on why 2025 was weak — provincial concentration, delayed pre-sales — plus the reserve-adjusted ROE it wants judged on.

Operating profit down on lower land-trust bookings and provisions; adjusted ROE of 9.51% on a separate basis.

당사의 2025년 영업이익은 토지신탁 부문의 신규 수주 감소 및 기존 토지신탁 사업장의 손실충당금 반영 등의 영향으로 전년 대비 감소하였습니다. 거시적으로 수도권 부동산 시장은점진적인 회복세를 보인 반면, 당사의 주요 사업장이 집중된 비수도권 지역은 높은 미분양주택 비중이 지속되는 등 지역 간 부동산 경기의 양극화가 심화되었습니다. 이러한 외부 환경 요인으로 인해 일부 사업장의 분양 지연 및 사업성 저하가 발생하였고, 이는 당사의 전반적인 수익성 하락으로 이어졌습니다. […] 아울러, 전 사업장에 대한 정밀 점검을 실시하고 충분한 대손준비금을 적립함으로써 잠재 부실에 대한 손실흡수능력을 크게 높였습니다. 보수적인 리스크 관리 기조하에 대손준비금을반영한 별도 기준 조정 ROE 역시 9.51%를 달성하여, 어려운 환경 속에서도 유의미한 재무적 성과를 시현하였습니다.

p. 208 · Read in context →

3. 재무상태 및 영업실적 · 다. 사업부문별 영업실적 — p. 211 · Read the full section →

Splits the group into trust and capital: trust operating profit fell 61%, and litigation wins, not operations, carried net income.

Trust segment: fees down, trust-account-advance credit quality worse, and a warning on provincial development trusts in 2026.

2025년 한 해 동안 부동산신탁업계는 부동산 경기 둔화, 프로젝트파이낸싱(PF) 시장 위축,건설원가 상승 등 복합적인 대외 환경 변화 속에서 어려운 경영 여건에 직면하였습니다. 이러한 환경 속에서 부동산 개발사업 착공이 감소하고 일부 사업장의 분양 일정이 지연되면서신탁보수 및 관리보수 등 영업수익이 전년 대비 감소하였으며, 신탁계정대 자산의 건전성 악화로 손실충당금이 확대되었습니다. […] 2026년에도 지정학적 리스크와 부동산 경기 양극화가 지속됨에 따라 업계 전반의 경영 환경은 여전히 순탄치 않을 것으로 예상됩니다. 특히 시장 침체의 여파로 지방 차입형 토지신탁사업의 정리 및 회수가 지연될 가능성이 존재합니다.

p. 211 · Read in context →

4. 유동성 및 자금조달과 지출 — p. 214 · Read the full section →

A trust company that lends into its own projects has to fund itself — this is the borrowing stack, its cost, and the maturity wall.

Net debt of ₩469.5bn at end-2025 and a lower average funding cost.

2025년말 현재 영업이익 내부유보 및 일반자금대출 한도 증액 등에 따른 충분한 유동성을확보하고 있으며, 보유 현금 및 현금성 자산을 차감한 순차입금은 469,476백만원입니다. 한편, 조달비용의 측면에서는 기준금리 인하 등에 따라 2025년 평균자금 조달금리가 전년 대비 하락하였습니다.

p. 217 · Read in context →

5. 부외거래 · 마. 그 밖의 우발채무 등 — (1) 책임준공 사업장의 리스크 관리 — p. 218 · Read the full section →

The risk that has killed peers: if a contractor misses completion, the trustee owes the lenders. This page sizes what is left of that book.

한국자산신탁 — FY2023 사업보고서 (제23기 Annual Business Report) — FY2023

The peak-cycle edition, kept for two sections that changed materially since: the peer market-share table later dropped, and the responsible-completion book at its largest. · Open the full document →

다. 부동산신탁 시장의 규모 및 영업 여건 — (3) 시장 점유율 추이(영업수익) — p. 18 · Read the full section →

A named-peer revenue share table covering all 14 trust companies; the FY2025 report no longer publishes it.

More annual reports

한국자산신탁 — FY2024 사업보고서 (제24기 Annual Business Report) — FY2024 · 331 pages · The year the provisions landed: operating profit down ₩64.9bn and reserve-adjusted ROE negative for the first time. · Open →

한국자산신탁 — FY2022 사업보고서 (제22기 Annual Business Report) — FY2022 · 304 pages · The last pre-stress edition, with the development-trust and responsible-completion books still being written. · Open →

한국자산신탁 — FY2021 사업보고서 (제21기 Annual Business Report) — FY2021 · 293 pages · Earliest edition on the shelf; useful as the cycle baseline before rates turned and PF funding tightened. · Open →

---

Competitors describe Korea Asset In Trust Co., Ltd.'s market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

한국토지신탁 (Korea Real Estate Investment & Trust, "KOREIT") (034830)

The only other listed pure-play Korean real estate trust company, and the closest thing Korea Asset In Trust has to a mirror. KOREIT holds the same 신탁업 licence from the FSC, sells the same product set - 차입형 and 관리형 토지신탁, 담보신탁, 분양관리신탁, 대리사무 - competes for the same 신탁방식 도시정비 (trust-led redevelopment) mandates, and runs the same kind of REIT AMC alongside it. It was founded in 1996 as a subsidiary of Korea Land Corporation, five years before KAIT, and the two have traded the top of the industry's capital table for years. It matters more than any other document here for a second reason: KOREIT's 사업보고서 is the industry's de facto market-structure report. It reproduces the Korea Financial Investment Association data for all fourteen licensed trust companies - equity, net income, operating revenue, market share - with 한국자산신탁 named in every table. A KAIT reader gets the subject's own share, computed and published by its nearest rival.

코람코자산신탁 (Koramco Asset Trust), disclosed within LF Corp (093050)

Koramco Asset Trust is one of the fourteen licensed Korean real estate trust companies and, on 2025 operating revenue of KRW133.2bn, ranks seventh of the fourteen, two places below the subject. It is the peer whose shape is closest to what KAIT says it is becoming: a trust licence bolted onto a REIT asset-management franchise, with a captive fund manager (코람코자산운용) alongside. It is also the clearest case of a competitor publicly walking away from the business KAIT still leads with - its filing states plainly that it is rebuilding its trust portfolio away from 차입형토지신탁. Koramco is not separately listed; it is consolidated by LF Corp, the fashion group, whose 사업보고서 carries Koramco's standalone business section. Only that section is used here - LF's apparel brands, Maison Kitsune, Max Mara and the rest are set aside as irrelevant to the subject.

Koramco Asset Trust's self-assessment, from the Koramco business section of LF Corp's FY2025 사업보고서 (p.52). Two claims matter to a KAIT reader. First, Koramco describes itself as holding an 과점적 시장지위 - an oligopolistic market position - in REIT asset management for office and retail assets, which is its own characterisation and carries no supporting share figure in the filing. Second, and more concretely, it says it is restructuring its trust portfolio away from a 차입형토지신탁 core toward urban-regeneration work and non-land trusts, and rebuilding its business base for stability. That is a direct strategic divergence: the subject's FY2025 filing still shows about KRW2.2tn of 차입형 land trust inside KRW22.6tn of total assets under trust, and books roughly 60% of its new fee commitments there. One competitor is deliberately reducing the exposure the subject is still writing.

2006년 3월 당사는 부동산신탁업 본인가를 취득하여 리츠 자산관리와 더불어 부동산신탁업 을 겸영함으로써 주택 개발 등의 토지신탁 사업과 분양관리신탁, 대리사무 등의 비토지 상품 들을 수주하여 부동산신탁사업영역을 확대해 왔습니다. […] 나. 당사의 강점 및 단점 당사는 우수한 운용 성과와 영업 네트워크에 기반해 REITs 설립·운용의 전 과정에서 차별적 인 사업 경쟁력을 시현하며 REITs AMC로서 우수한 시장지위가 유지되고 있습니다. 특히, 오피스·리테일 자산을 취급하는 REITs AMC부문에서 과점적 시장지위를 확보하고 있으며, 신규 REITs 설립을 통해 최상위의 영업력을 유지하고 있습니다. 부동산신탁업 또한 부동산 산업에 대한 높은 이해도와 전문성을 갖춘 전문 인력을 바탕으로 운영하는 중입니다. 신탁사업 사업포트폴리오를 기존 차입형토지신탁 중심에서 도시재생사 업, 비토지신탁 등 비차입형 토지신탁을 중심으로 개편하고 있으며, 수익과 안정적인 운영을 위한 사업기반을 재구축하고 있습니다.

p. 52 · Read in context →

Koramco's revenue by product line and its assets under trust, three years, from LF Corp's FY2025 사업보고서 (p.59); columns run 2025 / 2024 / 2023 throughout and amounts are KRW millions. The first block is the foot of the revenue-by-line table that begins on p.58, so its 자산관리 수수료 and 토지신탁 rows sit on the previous page; the total is what matters - KRW82.2bn in 2025 against KRW141.3bn in 2024. Essentially all of the swing is the REIT asset-management fee line reproduced beneath it, KRW58.2bn against KRW119.2bn, which is transaction-driven (acquisition and disposition fees) rather than recurring. The trust table underneath shows the structural point: assets under trust grew to KRW17.5tn from KRW8.9tn in 2023, but the fee take on them fell to KRW17.8bn from KRW19.1bn. Almost all the growth is 담보신탁 - collateral trust - at KRW12.8tn of trust principal earning KRW6.0bn, while 토지신탁 at KRW2.7tn earned KRW10.1bn. That is the ratio that explains why assets under trust is a poor proxy for revenue in this industry, and it is worth holding against the subject's headline KRW22.6tn: the mix inside the number does more work than the number.

관리신탁 132 126 61 처분신탁 872 272 64 담보신탁 5,957 4,103 3,873 분양관리신탁 461 215 190 기타 348 173 179 대리사무 6,229 5,064 3,585 합계 82,242 141,325 75,853 […] 자산관리 수수료 58,170 119,187 53,172 […] 토지신탁 2,659,370 10,073 2,292,043 12,185 2,234,797 14,729 관리신탁 477,624 132 190,106 126 279,846 61 처분신탁 836,640 872 442,899 272 446,489 64 담보신탁 12,777,315 5,957 10,445,901 4,103 5,533,083 3,873 분양관리신탁 791,180 461 811,360 215 407,403 190 기타보수 - 348 - 173 - 179 합계 17,542,129 17,843 14,182,309 17,074 8,901,618 19,096

p. 59 · Read in context →

Koramco's published fee card for REIT asset management, from LF Corp's FY2025 사업보고서 (p.55): 0.5%-1.0% of the purchase price on acquisition, 0.1%-0.3% of assets under management annually, 0.5%-1.0% of the sale price as a base disposition fee, and a performance fee of 10.0%-20.0% of the disposition gain. These are stated ranges, not realised rates, and the filing gives no indication of where inside them Koramco actually prices. They are still the most concrete public benchmark available for the economics of the Korean REIT AMC business, which is one of the ancillary lines the subject runs alongside its trust licence (KAIT holds both REITs AMC and PFV AMC mandates). The shape of the schedule also explains Koramco's own revenue volatility in the exhibit above: two of the four fee events happen only when an asset is bought or sold.

1) 리츠(REITs) 자산관리회사(AMC) 업무 다수의 투자자로부터 자금을 모집하여 부동산 또는 부동산과 관련된 유가증권에 투자·운용 하여 발생한 수익을 투자자들에게 배당하는 부동산 간접투자방식입니다. […] <보수산정기준> 수수료 구분 기준가액 보수율 비고 매입 매입가 0.5% ~ 1.0% 매입시점 수취 운영 운영자산 0.1% ~ 0.3% 연간 수취 매각 기본 매각가액 0.5% ~ 1.0% 매각시점 수취 매각 성과 매각차익 10.0% ~ 20.0% 기타 - - 자문 수수료 등

p. 55 · Read in context →

하나금융지주 (Hana Financial Group) (086790)

Hana Financial Group owns 하나자산신탁 (Hana Asset Trust), which on 2025 operating revenue of KRW155.7bn and 9.36% share ranks just above the subject in the industry table, and which KAIT's own filing shows as the most fee-productive trust company in Korea after KB - KRW104.1bn of fee income from 193 staff. Only the trust-adjacent parts of these calls are used: Hana's banking, cards, securities and insurance businesses do not compete with the subject. What the transcripts give that no annual report does is a lender's running commentary on the real-estate project-finance cycle that sets the subject's environment - the same PF market whose contraction drives 신탁계정대 recoveries, developer defaults and the pace at which new development trusts get written. Hana is also the only peer here that holds live earnings calls with analyst Q&A.

The most recent read available in this document set: Hana's Group CRO on the Q1 2026 call, 24 April 2026, identifying alternative investments and real estate project financing as what group credit cost actually consists of. Less of it was recognised in Q1, which flattered the quarter, and he expects more in Q2, with full-year guidance of a mid-30bp credit cost ratio. Six months after the Q3 2025 comment above, the real-estate PF clean-up is still the swing item in a major Korean financial group's provisioning - a useful check on any assumption that the development-credit cycle the subject operates in has already turned.

['Jae Shin Kang (Group CRO, Hana Financial Group)']: And then, usually, when we talk about credit cost, it is about alternative investments or real estate project financing. We had less of that recognized in Q1 which was a positive factor in credit cost in Q1. We do see that they could increase in Q2. So, our plan until end of this year is mid-30 bp credit cost ratio, that's our guidance.

p. 6 · Read in context →

SK디앤디 (SK D&D) (210980)

SK D&D competes with the subject on two fronts rather than head to head across the whole business. Its subsidiary 디앤디인베스트먼트 is a REIT asset-management company licensed under the same 부동산투자회사법 as KAIT's REITs AMC, and it claims the number-one position in Korea by residential AUM. And as a developer that originates, funds and sells its own projects through REITs and funds, it is the alternative route for exactly the sponsors a trust company wants as 위탁자 - a developer who can assemble the site, the capital and the exit in-house has less need to hand the project to a 차입형 trust. Its filing is also the best sizing in this document set of the institutional rental-housing market (기업형 임대주택), which the subject names as one of its stated expansion areas. Its furniture business and the demerged renewables arm are set aside.

SK D&D's description of its REIT asset manager, from its FY2025 사업보고서 (p.28). D&D Investment claims cumulative AUM of KRW5tn including KRW1.6tn of residential assets, and states it holds the number-one position in Korea by residential asset AUM - the company's own claim, with no source or ranking body cited, and 'cumulative' AUM is a gross lifetime figure rather than a current balance. The listed assets run across rental housing (the Episode brand), offices, a Jeju hotel and logistics centres. The relevance to KAIT is scale in the adjacent business: the subject runs a REITs AMC and a PFV AMC as ancillary lines to its trust licence, and the competing platforms here are vertically integrated - development, asset management and property management under one owner - rather than fee-for-service.

[ 디앤디인베스트먼트㈜ ] 디앤디인베스트먼트㈜는 부동산투자회사법상 자산관리회사(REIT's AMC)로서 1.6조원의 주 거시설 자산을 포함한 누적 AUM(Asset Under Management) 5조원의 성과를달성하였으며, 국내 주거시설 자산 운용규모 1위의 실적을 보유하고 있습니다. 상품기획, 인허가관리, 설계 /시공관리, 운영관리, 매각전략 수립 등 One Stop 개발관리ㆍ자산운용 체계를 갖추고 있으 며, 다양한 투자 파트너십으로부터 최적의 투자구조를 수립하여 운용자산의 통합적인 프로 젝트 관리 및 자산운용을 수행할 수 있는 VerticalPlatform을 보유하고 있습니다. […] 2018년 12월 Episode 수유 838을 시작으로 Episode 신촌 369, Episode 서초 393, Episode 강남 262 등 임대주택 자산을 비롯하여 세미콜론 수송, 세미콜론 문래, 세미콜론 명 동, 서울역 오피스, 여의도 태영빌딩 등의 업무시설과 제주조선호텔, 백암물류센터, 남청라 물류센터, 방배동 시니어 등에 이르기까지 다양한 운용자산을 보유하며 안정적 투자 포트폴 리오를 구축하고 있습니다.

p. 28 · Read in context →

SK D&D's sizing of the Korean rental-housing market, from its FY2025 사업보고서 (p.45). Monthly-rent (월세) contracts passed 60% of Seoul lease transactions in 2024 and reached 65.9% by September 2025 as the 전세 deposit system unwinds; single-person households rose from 30.2% of the total in 2019 to 36.1% in 2024, with one- and two-person households projected at 72.4% by 2040. SK D&D's argument is that the private rental market, historically owned and run by individual landlords, is converting to an institutional 기업형 임대주택 model, and it points to Japan - where individuals own about 85% of rental housing but corporate operators run about 80% of it - as the template. The projections are government statistics as cited by SK D&D; the Japan analogy is its own framing. This is the market the subject lists among its expansion areas alongside urban redevelopment and REITs, described here by a company that has already built more than 6,000 units of operating stock in it.

주거용 부동산은 2023년 12월 국내 부동산 거래현황(도심 건축물 기준)에서 73%를 차지하며 , 이는 상업용 부동산의 약 6.1배에 육박합니다. 공급측면에서 주택사업은 분양과 임대의 두 가지 형태로 나뉘며, 임대주택은 전세와 월세로 구분할 수 있습니다. 전세 제도는 세계적으 로 유일한 국내 특유의 계약 구조로, 최근 몇 년간 시장 환경 변화로 인해 월세 전환이 가속 화되고 있습니다. 서울 전월세 거래에서 월세가 차지하는 비중은 2024년 60%를 넘어선 이 후 2025년 9월 기준 65.9%를 기록하며 지속적으로 증가하는 추세를 보이고 있습니다. 또한, 국가데이터처에 따르면 1인 가구의 비중은 2019년 30.2%에서 2024년 36.1%로 꾸준히 증가 하며, 소형 임대주택 수요를 견인하고 있습니다. […] ② 성장성 국내 임대주택 사업은 공공영역과 민간영역으로 구분됩니다. 민간 임대시장은 그동안 대부 분 개인 임대사업자 중심으로 운영되어 왔으나, 안정적 공급 및 전문적인 운영 필요성이 증 가함에 따라 기업형 임대주택 시장으로의 전환이 점점 가속화되고 있습니다. 최근 글로벌 IB및 주요 외국계 기업의 국내 임대주택 시장 진출이 활발해지면서, 기업형 임대주택 사업의 성장 가능성이 더욱 확대되고 있습니다. 실제로, 부동산 패러다임이 유사한 일본에서는 전체 임대주택 중 약 85%를 개인이 소유하고 있지만, 이 중 80% 가량을 기업형 임대주택사업자 가 운영하고 있으며, 국내에서도 이와 유사한 변화가 생길 것으로 예상됩니다.

p. 45 · Read in context →

More peer documents

한국토지신탁 (KOREIT) - FY2024 사업보고서 — FY2024 · 302 pages · p.30 is the same fourteen-company table one year earlier, which makes the year-on-year moves visible - 신한자산신탁 at negative KRW308.6bn, 교보자산신탁 at negative KRW240.9bn, 무궁화신탁 at negative KRW119.8bn and KB부동산신탁 at negative KRW113.3bn net income in 2024, the losses behind the industry's aggregate operating deficit, with 한국자산신탁 one of eight of the fourteen still in profit that year at KRW16.5bn; pp.29-30 also carry KOREIT's own framing of what the trust market is. · Open →

LF Corp - FY2024 사업보고서 (코람코자산신탁 sections) — FY2024 · 363 pages · p.55 extends Koramco's revenue-by-line table back to 2022, when REIT asset-management fees were about KRW110bn - which shows the KRW119.2bn 2024 figure was not a one-off spike and makes the drop to KRW58.2bn in 2025 a genuine break rather than mean reversion. · Open →

SK디앤디 (SK D&D) - FY2024 사업보고서 — FY2024 · 555 pages · p.30 puts SK D&D's operating rental-housing stock at about 4,014 units at end-2024, against more than 6,000 a year later - the growth rate of the institutional rental platform the subject says it wants to expand into. · Open →

Hana Financial Group - Q3 2025 earnings call transcript — Q3 FY2025 · 13 pages · p.8 has Hana Bank's CFO on the composition of IB fee income: real estate is taking a smaller share of loan-arrangement fees while acquisition finance fills the gap - a lender's read on shrinking development-finance volume, which is the origination pool for new development trusts. · Open →

Hana Financial Group - FY2025 earnings call transcript — FY2025 · 18 pages · pp.15-16 continue past the exhibit with the Group CFO on non-banking capital allocation - KRW14.5tn of invested capital contributing only about 12% of group net income, and a decision to stop injecting capital beyond regulatory minimums - the funding backdrop for a top-three trust competitor. · Open →