How to Sell Property in Thailand as a Foreigner

This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Thai tax rules and Land Office practice change — confirm your own position with a licensed Thai lawyer and your bank before you sign anything.

Quick answer: You can sell property in Thailand as a foreigner on the same terms as a Thai seller. Budget 8–10% of the price in costs, allow far longer than the "3 to 12 months" usually quoted — across 407 tracked Phuket sales the median was 277 days — and keep the FET form from your purchase, because sending the proceeds home depends on it.

What it costs to sell property in Thailand as a foreigner

Most advice about selling here answers half the question: it lists the taxes, walks through the Land Office appointment, then waves at the timeline with a range so wide it means nothing. Start with the costs, which are at least knowable.

Four charges can land at the Land Office on transfer day. Which of them apply depends on how long you have owned the property and, for one of them, on whether you are an individual or a company.

Transfer fee — 2% of the appraised value. The Land Department maintains its own appraised value for every property, and it is normally below the market price you actually agreed. The fee is legally payable by both parties, so who pays is a matter of contract; a 50/50 split is the common Phuket outcome, with buyers occasionally absorbing all of it in a soft negotiation.

One point worth being blunt about, because it circulates wrongly in owner groups: Thailand's stimulus scheme that cut the transfer fee to 0.01% is restricted to Thai nationals. Foreign parties pay the full 2%.

Specific Business Tax — 3.3%, if you held under five years. This is 3% SBT plus a 0.3% local levy, charged on the higher of the appraised value or the actual sale price. The tax and its exemption framework sit with the Thai Revenue Department under Section 91/2 of the Revenue Code; the 3.3% is what the Land Office actually assesses, being the 3% tax plus a 10% municipal surcharge on it. Hold for five years or more and it falls away entirely. On a ฿15M sale that is ฿495,000 — the single largest line in the stack, and the one that a few months of patience can erase.

Stamp duty — 0.5%, but only when SBT does not apply. These two are mutually exclusive, which many guides blur into a single list as if you paid both. You pay SBT or stamp duty, never the pair.

Withholding tax — the one nobody can quote as a flat number. For an individual seller, the Land Office computes it on the appraised value, subtracts a standard deduction that scales with the number of years you owned the property, and applies Thailand's progressive personal income tax rates of 0–35% to what is left. The effective result usually lands between 1% and 5% of appraised value. For an individual, that payment at transfer is generally treated as the final settlement of tax on the gain — you are not normally re-declaring the sale in an annual return.

Add an agency commission of 3–5% and the seller side typically totals 8–10% of the price.

For the rates in depth — including annual Land & Building Tax and what the buyer pays — see our full Phuket property tax breakdown. The rest of this guide assumes you know the numbers and want to know what to do.

A note on "capital gains tax"

Thailand does not levy a separate capital gains tax on an individual disposing of property. The gain is taxed through the personal income tax system, collected as that withholding at the Land Office. If you search for a Thai CGT rate you will not find one, because there isn't one — and any page quoting a clean single percentage is describing something else.

Your home country is a separate question entirely, and one this guide cannot answer for you. Many jurisdictions tax a foreign property disposal regardless of where the money sits. Ask an adviser at home before you sell, not after.

How long it really takes — Phuket numbers

Here is where the generic advice fails. "Three to twelve months" is not a forecast; it is a shrug.

We track listings across the Phuket for-sale market and record when one leaves the catalogue as sold. Taking every tracked sale with a usable listing date — 407 sales, measured from the date the property was listed to the date the sale was observed — the distribution looks like this:

Put differently: 19% of these properties sold within 90 days, 33% within six months, 65% within a year — which means roughly a third took longer than twelve months.

By property type:

By asking price:

The ฿10–20M band is the one that breaks the pattern — slower than the cheap end and slower than the trophy end. A reasonable reading, offered as a reading rather than a finding: that range sits above what most foreign condo buyers are spending and below the budget of the buyer who is shopping for a signature villa, so it draws from the thinnest pool on both sides. If your property is in that band, plan your finances around a longer runway rather than assuming you sit near the overall median.

How to read these figures honestly. The clock starts at the listing date and stops when our detector observed the sale, so it includes some detection lag and is best treated as an upper-ish bound rather than a precise time-to-contract. The window closes on 12 July 2026 — our sold-listing detector lost its data source after that date and we would rather show you a dated sample than a fresh-looking guess. For live inventory and price levels, see the live Phuket market statistics, which are refreshed on a different pipeline.

What these numbers should change in your planning: if your exit has a deadline — a visa, a school year, a purchase elsewhere — start roughly twelve months before it, not three.

Freehold condo and leasehold villa: two different exits

Most selling guides quietly assume you own a freehold condominium. In Phuket a large share of foreign-held property is a villa on a leasehold, and the exit is not the same transaction.

A freehold condo is the clean case. You hold the title, you transfer it at the Land Office, and the meaningful constraint is the foreign quota: a maximum of 49% of a building's sellable floor area can be foreign-owned. If your unit sits inside that quota, your buyer pool includes foreigners paying from abroad. If it sits in the Thai quota, your pool is Thai buyers and foreigners buying through structures — materially smaller, and something to establish before you price.

A leasehold villa is an assignment of the remaining lease term, not a sale of land. Two things follow. The remaining term is the asset, and it shortens every year you hold, which works against you in a way freehold does not. And the lessor — usually the landowner or the project company — normally has to consent to the transfer, and may charge a transfer fee set in the original lease. Read your lease before you set an asking price; the answer to "can I even assign this, and at what cost" is in the document, not in general advice.

Our guide to freehold and leasehold ownership compared sets out the structures in full. The exit implication is the part usually left out: freehold sells an asset, leasehold sells a countdown.

The FET form: your exit was decided the day you bought

This is the section to read twice.

When you originally wired the purchase money into Thailand, your Thai bank issued a Foreign Exchange Transaction form — the FET, still called Tor Tor 3 by people who have been here a while. It records that foreign currency entered the country and was converted to baht inside Thailand.

At purchase, that document is what makes your title registrable. At sale, it is what lets your money leave. To repatriate sale proceeds in foreign currency, your bank will want the Land Office sale agreement and tax receipt, a copy of the title deed, and the original FET from the purchase. Proceeds up to the amount you originally brought in and documented repatriate without restriction, under the Bank of Thailand's foreign exchange regulations.

The consequence is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly: the paperwork that governs your exit was created years earlier, by someone else, at a moment when you were focused on buying. If you are reading this as an owner, find that form now — before you have a buyer and a deadline. If you are reading it as a prospective buyer, this is the document to file somewhere you will still find it in a decade. Our guide on the FET form you received when you wired the purchase money covers the inbound side in detail.

If the form is lost, the position is not hopeless but it is harder: your bank issued it and may be able to retrieve a record, which is a conversation to start early rather than during a transfer. Where the original inbound transfer cannot be evidenced at all, repatriating in foreign currency can be challenged, and you should take advice specific to your case.

Step by step: how to sell property in Thailand as a foreigner at the Land Office

The transaction itself is not exotic. The sequence that Phuket sales normally follow:

1. Establish your position first. Title or lease document in hand, quota status confirmed for a condo, lessor consent terms understood for a lease, outstanding common-area fees settled. Anything unresolved here surfaces later as a delay.
2. Price against real comparables. Not against what you paid, and not against the aspirational listing down the corridor that has been unsold for two years. Compare with current Phuket listings and with what Phuket property is worth by zone — and compare inside your own zone, not across the island, because a villa in Bang Tao and a condo in Phuket Town answer to completely different buyer pools.
3. List and market. Photographs, floor area, ownership structure and the remaining lease term if applicable, stated openly. Buyers filter hardest on the facts sellers most often omit.
4. Offer and deposit. A reservation or MOU with a deposit fixes the terms while the buyer runs due diligence.
5. Buyer due diligence. Title search, encumbrances, quota confirmation, building debts. Expect several weeks.
6. Sale and purchase agreement. Price, who bears which tax line, transfer date, what happens if either side walks.
7. Transfer day. Both parties (or their attorneys) attend the Land Office branch that holds the title. Taxes are assessed and paid on the spot, payment is exchanged — a cashier's cheque is standard — and the title is registered to the buyer.

Selling without flying in. You can complete remotely through a power of attorney, executed and notarised in your country of residence and, depending on where you are, legalised through the Thai embassy or consulate. Build in extra weeks: the document has to travel physically, and Land Office staff are entitled to reject a PoA that is imprecise about the specific property and the specific transaction. Instruct a Thai lawyer to draft the wording rather than adapting a template.

Selling a property held in a Thai company

Some foreign owners hold a villa through a Thai limited company. Selling then has two possible shapes, and they are taxed very differently.

Sell the property out of the company. The company is the seller. Withholding is a flat 1% of the higher of appraised value or sale price rather than the individual's progressive calculation, and the company's profit on the disposal falls into corporate income tax. Money then has to move from the company to you, which is its own set of steps.

Sell the company itself, transferring the shares so the new owner takes the entity that owns the villa. This avoids a Land Office property transfer, and buyers sometimes prefer it, but they inherit the company's entire history — filings, liabilities, past compliance. Sophisticated buyers price that risk or refuse it outright, and a company that was not maintained properly can be genuinely unsellable this way.

Which route is better is a question for your accountant with your numbers in front of them, and it should be settled before you list rather than during negotiation.

What actually slows a sale down

Against a median of 277 days, the recurring causes of the long tail are unglamorous:

Pricing from the purchase price. The most common single error. What you paid, particularly off-plan at launch, tells a buyer nothing about today's value. The market prices against current comparable supply — and with 5,855 active for-sale listings across 15 zones on our catalogue as of August 2026, the buyer has alternatives.

Unresolved paperwork. Missing FET, unpaid common-area fees, a lease whose assignment terms nobody has read. Each one converts an interested buyer into a stalled one.

A quota position discovered late. Finding out during negotiation that your unit is in the Thai quota shrinks your buyer pool at the worst possible moment.

Selling into your own deadline. A buyer who senses urgency negotiates differently. This is the practical argument for starting a year out.

The option people forget. Selling is not the only exit. If your deadline is soft and the numbers work, letting the property on the long-term rental market while you wait for a better bid is a real alternative to accepting a rushed discount — particularly in the ฿10–20M band, where the data says the wait is longest anyway.

What does not meaningfully move the needle: small price reductions applied late. Properties that sit unsold for a year rarely got there by being 3% expensive.

Frequently asked questions

Can a foreigner sell property in Thailand?

Yes. A foreigner who legally owns a condominium or holds a registered lease can sell or assign it on the same footing as a Thai seller, through the same Land Office transfer. Ownership structure affects who may buy from you and what tax applies, not your right to sell.

How long does it take to sell a condo in Phuket?

Across 407 tracked Phuket sales observed up to July 2026, the median time from listing to sale was 277 days, and condos specifically ran 262 days. Only 19% sold within 90 days. Plan on roughly a year if your exit has a fixed deadline.

Does Thailand charge capital gains tax on property?

Not as a separate tax. An individual's gain is taxed through personal income tax, collected as withholding at the Land Office on transfer day, calculated on appraised value with a deduction scaling by years owned. Effective cost usually falls between 1% and 5% of appraised value.

Can I send the money from the sale back to my home country?

Yes, with documentation. Your bank will require the Land Office sale agreement and tax receipt, a copy of the title deed, and the original FET form from your purchase. Proceeds up to the amount originally brought into Thailand repatriate without restriction.

What happens if I lost my FET form?

Start with the bank that issued it, as it may hold a retrievable record — and start before you have a buyer waiting. Where the original inbound transfer cannot be evidenced at all, repatriating proceeds in foreign currency may be challenged, and you should take advice specific to your situation.

Can I sell my Phuket property without flying to Thailand?

Yes, through a power of attorney executed and notarised where you live and legalised as your jurisdiction requires. Have a Thai lawyer draft the wording for the specific property and transaction, and allow several extra weeks for the document to travel and be accepted.

The short version: to sell property in Thailand as a foreigner you need three things ready long before a buyer appears — clean title or lease paperwork, a price set against today's comparables rather than what you paid, and the FET form from your original purchase. Get those in order and the Land Office day is the easy part.

Thinking about the buy side instead? See buying in Phuket as a foreigner and the investment case for Phuket property.

Done in the right order, selling property in Thailand as a foreigner is an administrative exercise, not a gamble — the risk lives in the paperwork you did or did not keep, and in the runway you gave yourself.