Transcript of the above video: 

I recently announced that we are setting up or have set up a second news service channel - Integrity News Service - I'll put links in the description below to get you over there to that channel. I'm not exactly bifurcating what we are doing here but more the op-ed and news stuff is going to move over to Integrity News Service. I'm going to keep this channel really focused tightly on legal news, immigration news, things that pertain to the expat world - Thailand specifically - whereas Integrity News Service is going to go much more broad and we are not necessarily going to be as Thailand-centric, but I want to leave Integrity Legal Thailand where it was to begin with really. I've gotten very broad in coverage of various things over the past year or two, and I think it's time that we create a new channel and tighten up, well we have already had this channel for a little while - but tighten up Integrity Legal Thailand, keep it on point while I'm also kind of able to go off and explore, basically my rants, when I'm over on Integrity News Service. But it's more of a news function, I want to be clear about that. 

While I am plugging things here, also worth pointing out that my better half and I set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok, Pancake Palace. As the name implies, breakfast anytime and American Diner style food. There are links in the description below if you want to come check us out down at Pancake Palace and we would truly love to see you there.

That said, the purpose of the video is talking about Property Law and Immigration Analysis. In the past week there's been a lot of talk about so-called long-stay visas and how you can get a Visa with some sort of property purchase, some sort of even long-term rental and it's being sort of, how do I put it, 'conflated' might be the right word, but basically it's being sort of billed as if these two are sort of naturally linked. As I discussed in another video recently, we've seen this before, and the thing to look at this as is as a sort of an immigration gimmick that is being sort of tacked on to folks trying to sell property; at the end of the day they are trying to sell you something, and if they can add a gimmick of "hey you get a Visa out of it" then they will try to do that. Now I'm not necessarily saying it's impossible to get a Visa associated with property, but as I've discussed in many other videos going back years now, I discussed years ago when they effectively just ended issuing O Visas for those who owned a condo in Thailand; there was a time when that was done as a matter of course. As a practical matter now, it's a really difficult thing to see an O Visa issued in connection with ownership of a condominium; it's just not done as a correlative as it once was. Again, there has been a lot of talk about so-called Long Stay Visas which has a very vague connotation as well as a very specific one as there was a sort of long-stay visa if you will create it during the COVID pandemic and we really saw it fall by the wayside, I think mostly because it was created at a time when we were dealing with Certificates of Entry and things and it was created to fill a purpose at that moment, and since then we haven't really seen or heard much of it, so when they use that term, I think it's kind of being used euphemistically.

But that being said, understand yes, there may be Visa options out there that people are not aware of, but they are not necessarily tied directly to property ownership. And another thing is, don't make major life decisions especially about buying a home or a possible property based purely off immigration considerations. I think it's really important to point out, again in the past, we saw Elite Visas being tied to buying of certain types of property. Again we saw the O Visa associated with ownership of a Thai condo being issued in the past. It's not unheard of to see visas associated with some sort of property right or property title, but again it's not a direct correlation. Again, like with the Elite Visa itself, membership in the program merely provides one an opportunity to apply for the Visa. Immigration still looks at the totality of the circumstances in the case when they make a decision regarding whether or not to issue a Long-term Visa. 

So the thing to take away from this video and understand is yes, there may be some sort of immigration gimmick associated with some sort of property purchase or acquisition, but again you have to analyze the two things if you will mutually exclusively, in order to understand what one's rights are with respect to property as well as what the benefits could be possibly under some sort of immigration rubric for purchasing property here in the Kingdom of Thailand.