Buying Property in Hua Hin as a Foreigner: What You Can and Cannot Do

Most of what you will read about buying property in Thailand was written by somebody who gets paid when you sign. This is not that. Thai property law moves, and parts of it are under review as we write. We are not lawyers, and this is not advice.

Foreigners cannot own land

A foreigner cannot own land in Thailand. Not a plot, not the ground under a villa, not the garden. The exceptions are narrow — a Board of Investment concession, an inheritance route that in practice ends in a forced sale — and none describes somebody buying a house off Soi 88.

What you can own outright is a condominium unit. Under the Condominium Act a foreigner may hold a unit freehold, in their own name, registered at the Land Office, and may sell it, mortgage it or leave it to their heirs. That is genuine ownership, and the only clean freehold most foreigners will get here.

The catch is the quota.

How the 49 per cent quota works, and what it does to the price

In a registered condominium, foreigners may own up to 49 per cent of the total saleable floor area. Not 49 per cent of the units — floor area, common parts excluded. The rest must sit with Thai nationals or Thai-majority companies. Each building has its own pool, so the developer’s other project tells you nothing.

Before you pay anything, ask the building’s juristic person for a written statement of the quota remaining, and ask again on the day of transfer. Quota is consumed at registration, not at reservation, so you can be beaten to the last few square metres by somebody who signed after you did.

This is why the same flat carries two prices. In older buildings near the beach and around Khao Takiab the foreign quota went years ago. What is left is Thai quota, and it is cheaper. Buy it and you own a unit you can only ever sell to a Thai buyer. The difference is a line in a register, and it is real money. Where quota is gone, developers offer a lease instead — a different asset, and it should not be priced like a freehold.

Leases: 30 years, and the part nobody enjoys hearing

Thai law caps a registered lease at 30 years. A lease over three years must be registered at the Land Office to be enforceable beyond three years.

You will be offered “30 plus 30”, sometimes “30 plus 30 plus 30”. Understand what that second 30 is. It is a promise to grant a new lease later, and the Supreme Court has held that pre-agreed automatic renewals locking in the original terms are void. The reasoning matters more than the case number: you cannot buy 60 years by stapling two leases together.

Even a properly drafted renewal option binds only whoever signed it. It does not attach to the land the way your registered lease does. If the landowner dies, sells, or is a company whose shares change hands, your renewal is worth whatever the new owner decides. Litigating that from abroad is not a plan. So price the lease as 30 years and treat renewal as a bonus. Never accept one promised in conversation, or by an agent who says everybody does it this way.

A bill to extend leases to 99 years has been floated since 2024, with a proposal to lift the quota above 49 per cent. Neither was law when this was written. Check the current position with a lawyer, not a sales office.

The Thai company structure

The pitch: set up a Thai limited company, give Thai shareholders 51 per cent, keep control through preference shares and directorships, and have the company buy the land. If those Thai shareholders are passive holders of somebody else’s shares, it is a nominee arrangement, and nominee arrangements are illegal under the Foreign Business Act. Penalties reach criminal liability for the foreigner and the nominees both, and the company can be unwound with the land sold off.

Enforcement has tightened sharply. Through 2025 and 2026 the Department of Business Development brought in source-of-funds evidence on company filings, and the Land Department began cross-checking shareholder registers against land titles. Thai press reporting describes tens of thousands of records screened and asset freezes in Phuket and on the Samui islands. Hua Hin has had less attention — a difference in enforcement priority, not in the law.

A company that genuinely trades, with real Thai shareholders risking their own money, is legitimate. One that exists only to hold your house is not. If somebody sets it up inside a week and never asks where the shareholders’ money came from, you have your answer.

Usufruct and superficies

A usufruct gives you the registered right to occupy land and take its income, for up to 30 years or for your lifetime. It is strong against the owner while you live, but it dies with you, cannot be inherited, and a foreign holder’s ability to sub-let is limited. A decent home, a poor asset.

A superficies gives you the registered right to own buildings on someone else’s land, again for up to 30 years or for life, and it can be transferred and inherited. Hence the common villa structure: a registered lease over the land plus a superficies over the house. Both are noted on the title, both depend on a cooperative landowner, and neither becomes land ownership.

Getting the money in: the FET form

To register a condominium in a foreigner’s name, the Land Office needs proof that the money came into Thailand from abroad in foreign currency and was converted to baht here. The evidence is the Foreign Exchange Transaction form, issued by the receiving Thai bank and still often called by its old name, Tor Tor 3. Banks issue it automatically above a threshold, commonly cited at USD 50,000 per transfer, though that figure has changed before — confirm the current one with your bank.

Three things ruin this, all avoidable. Sending baht rather than foreign currency, when the conversion must happen in Thailand. A name mismatch, when the money must arrive in the name of the person going on the title. And a vague purpose field: “investment” gets rejected, “to purchase a condominium in Thailand” does not. Get the wording from your lawyer before you instruct the transfer.

Fees and taxes at the Land Office

Charges are calculated on the appraised or declared value, whichever is higher. The transfer fee is two per cent. Stamp duty is 0.5 per cent and applies where specific business tax does not. Specific business tax is 3.3 per cent including the local surcharge, and applies where the seller has held the property under five years. Withholding tax falls on the seller and varies with holding period and, for individuals, progressive rates; for a corporate seller it is one per cent.

Custom, not law, splits the transfer fee equally and leaves the seller the rest. It is negotiable and often departed from. Get the split written into the contract in figures, not as “normal practice”. Thailand has also repeatedly cut transfer and mortgage registration fees to 0.01 per cent for qualifying homes under ฿7 million, most recently extended into 2027. Those schemes have generally targeted Thai individual buyers, so assume you do not qualify.

Due diligence: the title and the developer

Your lawyer should pull a current copy of the title from the Land Office rather than accept the seller’s photocopy. For land, only a Chanote (Nor Sor 4 Jor) is a properly surveyed, GPS-marked freehold title; weaker documents such as Nor Sor 3 Gor record possessory rights with looser boundaries. The search should surface mortgages, servitudes, seizures, access rights, and whether the boundaries on paper match the fence in front of you.

On a developer, the questions are dull and load-bearing:

• What have they finished, and can you visit it and talk to owners who have lived there five years?
• Do the construction permit and condominium registration exist, and does the approved plan match the brochure?
• Who is behind the company, and what happened to their last project when the market turned?

Escrow exists in Thai law but is voluntary and rarely used, so off-plan money goes straight to the developer as working capital. If the project stalls you are an unsecured creditor in a foreign legal system. Stage payments against verified milestones, hold back a meaningful final payment until transfer, and be honest about whether the discount pays you for the risk.

The four ways people lose money

• Off-plan from an unproven developer. The discount is not a bargain. It is the price of the risk, and sometimes the risk lands.
• Nominee company structures. Sold as normal, enforced as illegal, and now actively looked for.
• Verbal renewal promises on leases. The person who promised will not be the person there in year 31.
• Using the agent’s lawyer. That lawyer is paid when the deal closes. Yours should be paid by the hour and willing to tell you not to buy.

Should you buy at all

Probably not in your first year, and that is arithmetic rather than modesty. Costs in and out take several per cent of the value, so a purchase you regret after eighteen months is an expensive way to learn which side of town you like. And Hua Hin is not one place. Behind Market Village, the sois south of Khao Takiab, Pranburi, the golf developments inland — drive times, October flooding, noise, neighbours and resale liquidity differ in each, and none of it shows in a listing photograph or a fortnight in February.

Renting is cheap by comparison. Long-term condo rents here start under ฿10,000 a month, and a comfortable one or two-bedroom is commonly ฿12,000–฿30,000 — indicative, and dependent on building and season. A year of it also tells you whether you want to be in Thailand at all after a full rainy season, a question many people answer differently in September than they did in January.

Buy when you know the street you want, have rented through a wet season, your visa position is stable, and you can afford the money to sit illiquid for a decade. Thai residential property is not a reliably appreciating asset, foreign-quota resale is a thin market, and a condominium gives you no right to stay in the country.

Where we come in

We help you understand Hua Hin before you commit to it: which areas suit how you actually live, what things really cost, and what a Tuesday here feels like. We do not sell property and take no commission from anyone who does. We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice — instruct your own independent Thai property lawyer, chosen and paid by you, before you sign anything or transfer a single baht.