Buying, selling, renting, mortgages, law and tax, written so you can decide when you finish reading
Read three clauses before anything else: financing, the transfer date and slippage, and how transfer costs divide. Those are where money changes hands. And returning double the deposit when a seller breaches is a contract term you have to ask for, not an automatic consequence of the law.
In principle it comes back for a condominium booking, because the Contract Committee Announcement of B.E. 2567 bars forfeiting the booking money except where the consumer is in breach, and a bank refusing credit is not a breach by you. For a house in a development or a resale house, the contract decides.
A condominium that sold out but where few people live, a house freshly renovated for resale, and anything affordable to hold but hard to sell. None is off limits, but each needs more checking time, because what goes wrong surfaces when you sell rather than when you buy.
Part of the fall comes from banks moving debt off their books rather than borrowers catching up. The Bank of Thailand attributes the drop to 534.8 billion baht in Q2 2026 mainly to accelerated management of loan quality, and what leaves the books returns to the market as property.
The differences are who checks the documents, who carries the risk if they are wrong, and how much of the market you see. Cost is not one of them for a buyer, because in the standard Thai model the seller pays about 3 per cent and the owner pays one month's rent on a letting.
Not to the point of recovery. The Real Estate Information Center calls 2026 a year that passed the low point into a flat state. Q1 transfers were 72,583 units, up 11.2 per cent, while value rose only 3.1, meaning more buyers purchasing cheaper. The 0.01 per cent fee measure ends on 30 June 2027.
Check three layers: GISTDA satellite imagery from past years, especially 2011; the marks on the building, such as a horizontal water line at one consistent level and paint refreshed only on the lower half; and what long-standing neighbours say. A residential fire policy caps all natural perils together at 20,000 baht a year, not at the sum insured.
Feng shui does move prices, but not through the number itself. A study of nearly 117,000 US sales found addresses ending in 4 sold about 2.2 per cent below and those ending in 8 about 2.5 per cent above, but only in neighbourhoods with many residents of Chinese descent. Below 10 per cent, the difference vanished.
Purple on a Thai city plan is industrial and warehousing land, and plum is warehousing only. Both prohibit residential subdivision and tall residential buildings, and cap other uses at ten per cent of the whole zone rather than ten per cent of your plot. Codes Or 1, Or 2 and Or 3 are redefined in each plan's own regulation.
Ror Ngor 4 is the licence to operate a class 3 factory under Thailand's Factory Act. Since 27 October 2019 a factory starts at 50 horsepower or 50 workers, up from 5 and 7, so smaller operations no longer need one. Anyone buying or renting an existing factory has 7 days to apply for the transfer.
Land so surrounded that it has no way out to a public road may pass over the surrounding land under Section 1349 of the Civil and Commercial Code, on the least damaging reasonable alignment, and compensation is the rule. Where a subdivision or partial transfer created the problem, Section 1350 gives the way without compensation.
Four checks are free and self-service before a deposit: the appraised value at assessprice.treasury.go.th, the parcel position and shape at the Land Department LandsMaps service, the zoning through Bangkok city planning or the Department of Public Works, and expropriation decrees in the Royal Gazette. Mortgages and injunctions still require a certified copy of the deed at the land office.
