Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing usufructs. For those who are unaware, usufructs are a right of use. I kind of think of them, because most of the time that we deal with these, we often deal with them in the context of married couples where one of the spouses is a Thai national. They own land but the foreign national has put substantial resources into the land and oftentimes want to register a usufruct in order to maintain their ability to use the property and secure some rights for themselves in that marital property, at least during their lifetime. In a way, I kind of equate, especially in a family context, I kind of equate a usufruct to a Life Estate which is a Common Law terminology for a similar type of instrument although it is not completely similar.

For example, and the reason for this video is there is sort of a delineation within the Land Department and within the regulations and things regarding commercial usufructs versus personal use usufructs insofar as, as I said we usually deal with this in the context of folks that have a family member for example that may own a piece of property and the foreign national wants to secure some rights to the property. That may be the case but Land Department may want to know why you are doing it because some tax assessment issues may come up and commercial use is a very different animal in many, many ways compared to personal use. Beyond even that, and I am not wading into some waters where maybe I am not so familiar here, but there may also be some policy thinking behind this where there are restrictions on foreigners owning land in Thailand for a reason and that is they want to protect the interest of Thai Nationals and I totally understand that. In this commercial context I can kind of see where from a policy standpoint someone would say look "we don't want to necessarily grant a foreign national unfettered commercial usage of a piece of land, it is effectively as if they own that land in their life time. We kind of have some policy conflict with that." I can kind of see the thinking on that. Whereas personal use maybe I think I could see the thinking being a little less negative with regard to a usufruct for a foreigner. Again that is me speculating a little bit about policy thinking here and I am not going to indulge in too much more of that for purposes of this video.

Long story short, yeah there is kind of a delineation or a splitting if you will, bifurcation in the analysis regarding a usufruct for commercial use as opposed to a usufruct for personal usage of a given piece of property.