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Condo Title and Marriage in Thailand

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests we are discussing condominium title and marriage in the Kingdom of Thailand.

A recent comment on our channel, and I am going to quote directly "I currently own a condo under my own name as a foreigner. If I marry a Thai woman in the future, will the condo automatically fall under the name of my Thai wife?" Long story short, condos are exempt from most of the restrictions associated with foreign property ownership here in the Kingdom. 

For those who are unaware, foreign nationals are all but completely precluded from owning standard types of Thai real estate, most notably land, the title to land and house etc. So real property, what we think of as land or property title, is effectively closed off to foreign nationals in a legal sense. The Thai Condominium Act carved out a niche for foreigners to own condominiums in freehold. They can actually have freehold title to a condo. To be clear the condominium has to meet certain formalities in order to be covered under the Act in order to convey freehold title. Most notably a minority of the overall ownership of the juristic person of the condominium complex must be 49% or less foreign owned most notably but it is possible to gain free title in a Thai Condominium complex.

But the thrust of the question, so let's say you are a foreign national; you are in Thailand; you have Chanote, that is freehold title to a condo, and you get married to a Thai National. Does that automatically mean that Thai National gains title to that property? No, not automatically. You are the owner of that. Now it could be deemed that that fell into a marital estate and for this reason if you are worried about it, perhaps it might be a good idea to have a prenuptial agreement and I am getting into that another video contemporaneously I am making with this one. But long story short “no as a matter of course it doesn't mean that automatically that Thai spouse's name, that person, he or she, becomes the Chanote title holder.” No, that is not how it works.

Now issues pertaining to marriage and family law and marital estate that is another matter entirely, but long story short, no the property to a Thai condo does not automatically transfer to a Thai spouse upon a marriage being registered here in the Kingdom of Thailand.