Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing foreigners need to be careful when wading in if you will to the Thai Real Estate market. I have done a number of videos in the past where we discussed a lot of the aspects of this. One thing I unfortunately hear folks say all the time is they will say, especially foreign nationals, "oh it's no problem. I can buy a house, put it into a Thai company." As we have discussed in other videos, there have been raids by the Thai Police going after that specific thing and in those cases they have a tendency to dissolve those corporations and seize the assets, as we discussed in other videos fairly recently in fact. 

The other thing to bear in mind about this is just generally speaking, there are a number of restrictions on foreigners with regard to Thai real estate, land most especially. Not to put too fine a point on it, basically Thai Law excludes foreign nationals from owning land in Thailand, and there are other restrictions associated with real estate. Now depending on your specific situation, there may be a methodology wherein you can enjoy the usage of land in Thailand for example lifetime use under a usufruct structure, leasing, there may even be under very limited circumstances corporate structures which may be appropriate to use that involve Thai real estate but for the most part you need to be very careful with that. Last but definitely not least for foreign nationals looking to have a home in Thailand, it is possible to own a condo here in Thailand pursuant to the Thai Condominium Act wherein a foreign national can have Freehold title so-called fee simple absolute in the especially American Common Law vernacular, basically fee simple title, fee simple absolute or what is sometimes called Freehold Title here in Thailand, called Chanote, to have a free hold title deed to a condo in Thailand, very possible. That said, this whole topic is one of those things that I think there's a lot of things that many foreigners don't know what they don't know.

I got to thinking of this when I was reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Millionaire jailed over land grab. Quoting directly: "The Criminal Court for Corruption and Misconduct Cases, Region 8, has sentenced millionaire (name redacted) to 2 years and 8 months in jail over a land grab scandal, according to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC). The businessman was found guilty of aiding state officials in the illegal issuance of title deeds. The Court also ordered the Land Titles to be revoked." So these were seemingly legitimate title deeds that were nullified basically. Quoting further: "According to sources, (name redacted) had already sold the land to others for 400 million Baht in 2017." Quoting further: "The NACC, in another case, has brought charges against 10 politicians, including MPs and senators, over illegal land ownership or aiding state officials in the illegal issuance of title deeds."

So the thing to take away from this video, one it's the massive importance of due diligence and I'm doing another video contemporaneously with this one where we will go into that in further detail but more the point of this video is a lot of foreigners come to Thailand and they just sort of intuit that they can do XYZ; they just sort of believe without a great deal of reflection, or honestly in most cases any type of study or due diligence to ascertain whether or not their presumptions and assumptions are correct. Now this case is a really extreme outlier in that the underlying problem here stemmed from corruption that resulted in seemingly legitimate looking title deeds. So I can totally understand how somebody might have gotten swindled by this and done everything in their power to sort of mitigate against that. That said, in my opinion I think proper due diligence would have probably uncovered that "hey why are these deeds existing in the first place, the underlying land, how was that all done?" It is my opinion, and there is an element of speculation here and I don't mean to be a Monday morning quarterback, because this happened before and maybe there were folks involved and in good faith analyzed this situation and said "we thought it was legitimate"; I could see a scenario play out that way. 

But that said, I would think some rather deep due diligence might have resulted in finding that maybe perhaps this isn't quite as pristine a situation as it had first appeared. Now that said, there is an element of speculation there but the reason for the video is just again if you are a foreigner in Thailand, you are looking to get into real estate, you are looking to buy something, you are looking to even long-term leasing and things, it is definitely a good idea to contact a legal professional, gain some insight and guidance into how best to proceed.