Under the National Property Act, properties obtained by the nation through the laws, public rights, budget or donations are considered the national property, and all other properties, which do not belong to local governments or private citizens, should also be considered as national property.
The national property includes immovable properties, such as land and natural resources; movable properties, such as machines and equipment, transportation equipment, securities such as stocks and shares and bonds owned by the nation, and other rights,including surface rights, easement, pawning rights, mortgage, mineral rights, fishery rights, patent rights, copyright, trademark rights and others.
In order to manage the huge number of national properties , and to allow for greater benefits to the public , the National Property Administration works on the overhaul of all national land by registering , checking and surveying undeveloped national land ; clearing-up land owned by companies during the period of Japanese occupation ; managing estates without heirs and items which have been impounded ; salvaging buried and Sunken national properties ; retrieving hidden properties ; setting-up property registers ; leasing non-profit immovable properties ; leasing non-profit immovable properties ; dealing with the illegal occupation of national properties ; appropriating non-public national land or consigning it for management ; selling or making grants of national property , and setting-up surface rights to national non-public land .
In recent years , the National Property Administration has successively recovered land , which had previously been out-sourced , to be managed according to the principles of national property information management in order to enhance use , inject revenues into the national treasury , and achieve the concept of diversity in the use of land to thereby ensure the enhancement of the use of idle or under-used national property , and , under the National Property Management Committee , acting in an co-ordinating capacity , the competent authorities established the concept of cost-effectiveness ion the handling of the real-estate under its management . After this committee ceased operation in 2009, the ‘Working Group for the Superintendence of the Clean-UP and Re-Activation of National Land’, was later set-up to continue to oversee the clean-up of large areas of land designated for building by related agencies , establish the complete information of each case by applying the use of the principles of diversification and of the activation of cross-domain integration in order to enhance the benefits to be derived from the use of national land in an efficient way .