Owning from abroad
Property management in Phuket for foreign owners
Owning here from another country is not the same job as owning at home. The rules are Thai, the paperwork is in Thai, and the problems happen while you are asleep. This is what actually applies to you as a foreign owner, and where our part in it ends.
Read this first
We are managers. We are not your lawyer or your accountant.
Most of what follows is law, tax or immigration practice. We work alongside it every week, we do not have the standing to advise you on it, and a manager who pretends otherwise is a manager to be careful with.
Where our knowledge is genuinely useful
We deal with these rules operationally, on real properties, every week. That means we can usually tell you which question to ask, which document someone will want, and what happens in practice rather than on paper. It does not mean our answer is the one to rely on when ownership or money is at stake. Treat this page as orientation before a professional conversation, not as a substitute for one.
Where it stops
Ownership structures, company formation, tax positions and immigration status are matters for someone licensed to handle them. We will not draft your structure, file your return, or interpret your visa. When you ask us one of those questions the honest answer is a referral, and you should expect one rather than an opinion delivered confidently.
Who we point you to, and what we earn from it
We can name Thai law firms and accountants we have watched do careful work for owners over years. There is no arrangement between us and any of them, and nothing passes either way when you use one. Ask us that question directly, and ask it of every manager and agent you deal with here. A referral that pays someone is not automatically bad, but you are entitled to know before you take it.
Why drawing the line makes the rest more useful
Saying plainly where our role ends is what makes the parts we do claim believable. A company positioning itself as the answer to your legal, tax, immigration and operational questions at once is a company that has not been tested seriously on any of them. We are a small management house. The list of things we are good at is short on purpose.
How you hold it
Ownership structure decides more than owners expect.
Three routes cover almost every foreign owner on the island, each coming from a different piece of Thai law. What follows is background, not advice: it is here so you can ask a Thai lawyer the right question about your own property.
A condominium, held freehold in your own name
The Condominium Act allows foreign nationals to own units outright, within a cap: no more than forty-nine percent of a building’s saleable floor area may sit in foreign hands. Your unit is either inside that quota or it is not, and that is a fact about the building rather than about you. The purchase funds normally have to arrive from abroad in foreign currency and be converted here, and the bank paperwork proving it is what the Land Office asks for at registration. Keep that document. It becomes relevant again the day you sell and want the proceeds to leave the country.
A villa, with the land held on a registered lease
Foreign nationals generally cannot own land in Thailand, which is why villa purchases are usually built around a long lease of the land registered at the Land Office, often with the house itself owned separately from the ground it sits on. Thai law caps a registrable term at thirty years. Renewals written into your paperwork are contractual promises between the parties rather than something the registry guarantees in advance, and that distinction is the single most important thing to understand about your own documents. Ask your lawyer to explain in writing what happens at the end of the registered term.
A villa, with the land held through a Thai company
Widely used, and increasingly examined. A company that exists only to hold a house, with Thai shareholders who never actually funded their shares, is a nominee arrangement and is not lawful, whatever was normal when the structure was set up. A genuine company brings genuine obligations: real accounting, annual filings, an auditor, a registered office. If this is your structure, the yearly cost of keeping it clean is part of owning the property and belongs in your budget rather than in a surprise.
Why a manager cares about any of this
Structure decides whose name is on the electricity contract, who is treated as the house master for immigration reporting, whose account receives rental income, and who has the authority to let a technician through the gate on a Sunday. Handovers go wrong when none of that was written down. Before we take a property on we ask how it is held, not out of curiosity, but because half the operational questions answer themselves once we know.
TM30
The reporting obligation sits with you, not with your guest.
Separate from renting, separate from tax, and the rule most foreign owners have never heard of until it causes a problem at the worst possible moment.
What the rule actually says
Thai immigration requires the house master, owner or possessor of the property to notify immigration when a foreign national stays there. The duty falls on the property side, not on the visitor. The deadline is counted in hours rather than days, and both the procedure and the appetite for enforcing it have moved more than once in recent years. Confirm the current position with someone qualified rather than relying on what a forum said was true a few years ago.
It applies to more than paying guests
The obligation attaches to housing a foreign national, not to charging one. A friend staying a fortnight in your empty villa counts, and no money needs to change hands for the duty to exist. Whether it also catches you, arriving at your own property after time away, is genuinely contested. We have seen it answered both ways, and the answer has depended on which immigration office was asking. If you spend real time at the property yourself, that is a question to put to your lawyer rather than to us, and to put to them about your office rather than about Thailand in general. What is not in doubt is the friend-staying-free case, and it is almost always that one that goes unreported.
Where the gap shows up later
Nothing happens at the time, which is exactly why it gets ignored. It surfaces at a visa extension, a re-entry, a ninety-day report or a property transaction, when someone looks at the record and finds it thin. That is a far worse moment to discover the problem than the week it occurred, because you are then trying to repair history against a deadline, from another country, through someone else.
How we handle it, and what we cannot take off you
For properties we manage we file the notification for arriving guests and keep the record with the rest of your property file, so it exists when an official asks for it. What we cannot do is transfer the obligation: in law it stays with the owner or possessor. We do the work; you remain the person the rule is addressed to. Any manager telling you they have absorbed your legal duty has either misread it or is hoping you will not check.
The thirty-day question
Short stays, the Hotel Act, and the answer nobody likes giving.
This is where owners get told what they want to hear. Here is the version we give before a property is listed anywhere.
Why thirty nights keeps coming up
Thailand regulates paid accommodation through the Hotel Act. Offering a property to travellers for short stays is treated as operating accommodation, which is where the licensing question comes from at all. Renting on a monthly basis is generally treated as a rental arrangement instead, which is why so many buildings and owners settle on a thirty-night minimum. It steps around the question rather than answering it, and for many properties that is the sensible move.
Most villas were never built to hold a licence
A hotel licence carries building, safety and zoning requirements a private house was never designed to meet. Some developments were built specifically to obtain one, and some units sit under a licence held at project level without their owners realising. Yours might be one of them. It is worth establishing before assuming otherwise, because it changes what you are permitted to do rather than merely what you are prepared to risk.
Your nationality does not change the rule, but it changes your exposure
The licensing position depends on the property and the length of stay, not on who owns it. What being abroad changes is how a problem reaches you: an absent owner hears about a neighbour’s complaint late, through someone else, with fewer ways to settle it quietly. Enforcement here is often complaint-driven, which makes the relationship with the households either side of your wall an operational matter rather than a social one. We treat it as part of the job.
What you will get from us
Before your property goes on any platform we tell you plainly which of these situations it is in, including when the honest answer is that the position is unclear. If you then choose to rent short-term, you do it knowing what you are choosing, and the exposure is yours: not ours, and not the platform’s. We would rather lose the instruction than put an owner somewhere they would not have gone with the whole picture in front of them.
The money
Bank accounts, and how the money actually reaches you.
None of this is exotic. It is just badly explained to people who are not here to ask in person.
Opening a Thai account is harder than it sounds
What is required varies by bank and, in practice, by branch and by the day. Requirements have tightened, and non-residents are frequently asked for documents tied to a visa, a work permit, a property purchase or a local address. This is a conversation for the bank, and it is one of the few things where turning up in person still beats every other approach. We can tell you what owners have recently been asked to produce; we cannot open an account for you and would not want your documents in order to try.
The paperwork from your purchase matters years later
Where funds were brought in from abroad to buy a condominium, the certificate your bank issues to evidence that remittance is not a formality to be filed and forgotten. It is what the Land Office wanted at registration, and it is what a bank will want to see when you eventually sell and want the proceeds to go home. Owners lose it constantly. Scan it, and keep the scan somewhere that is not a laptop you will replace.
Whose account collects the rental income
Ask any manager whether guest payments land in their account or in yours, when the balance moves, and what is held back against damage or upcoming costs. Both models exist and both can be run honestly. What matters is that it is written into the agreement, that the timing is a fixed date rather than “when we get to it”, and that every movement appears on a statement you can read line by line without ringing anyone.
Getting money out of Thailand
Routine, and documented. Banks will ask what the funds are and where they came from, and that question is easy when your records are clean and awkward when they are not. Expect costs at both ends: the sending bank, the exchange rate itself, the receiving bank. Note that we neither set them nor take any part of them. Ask your own bank what applies to you before you plan around a number.
Tax
What gets taxed, by whom, and what we can and cannot do about it.
We are not accountants and we will not put a number on any of this. What we can do is name the things that exist, so you know what to ask and who to ask.
Rental income earned in Thailand is taxable in Thailand
Income arising from a property here is Thai-source income, whether you live in Bangkok or Brussels. How it is assessed depends on whether the property is held personally or through a company, and on your own residence position. There are deductions and allowances a Thai accountant will apply properly and that you will not reliably find by reading forums. The expensive mistake is rarely paying the wrong amount: it is not knowing which return you were meant to file.
The annual land and building tax
Thailand assesses an annual tax on land and buildings, collected by the local authority, with the treatment depending on how the property is classified: residential, commercial, agricultural, vacant. A property being rented out may be treated differently from one you occupy yourself, and the classification is worth checking rather than assuming. The bill goes to the owner. It is one of the costs that quietly appears in the first full year and surprises people who budgeted only for the purchase.
The charges that arrive at transfer
Buying and selling both attract charges at the Land Office: a transfer fee, stamp duty or specific business tax depending on the circumstances, and a withholding element on the seller’s side. Who pays which part is customary rather than fixed, and it is negotiated in the sale like anything else. That makes it a conversation to have with a lawyer and an accountant before you agree a price, not after you have shaken hands on one.
Your own country may not be finished with you
Whether Thai rental income is also taxable where you come from depends on your residence position there, and that position changes if you have ceased to be resident, which is why two owners on the same street get different answers to the same question. A small number of countries, the United States most notably, tax their citizens wherever they live, and that changes the question again. Thailand has double tax agreements with many countries that determine which side gets what. All of this is a two-country question and it needs someone qualified on both sides of it. Nobody in Phuket can answer the home-country half, ourselves emphatically included. Owners who get this wrong usually did so by asking only one of the two.
What we actually provide
Itemised owner statements, invoices and receipts for what was spent, and a yearly summary in a form an accountant can work from without calling us for context. We keep the records; your adviser uses them. That is the whole of our role in your tax affairs, and it is worth testing before you engage anyone: ask a manager to produce the equivalent for a year already gone, and see how long it takes.
From another time zone
Running a house you cannot walk into.
This is the part owners underestimate, and it has nothing to do with paperwork.
Small problems get expensive in the time it takes to notice them
A dripping condenser is fifteen minutes of work on the day and a ceiling repair three weeks later. Phuket makes that arithmetic worse than most places, because the southwest monsoon runs from around May to October and a closed-up house does not sit still through it. We have opened houses shut for a fortnight in August and found mould on the wardrobe backs. A blocked roof drain finds the ceiling in a single afternoon of rain. A pool nobody skimmed goes green while you are answering email somewhere dry. Distance does not create these problems; it removes the moment when somebody would have noticed. That is the actual thing you are buying from a manager, and it is worth being clear-eyed that you are buying attention rather than magic.
You only know what somebody chooses to tell you
From abroad, your entire picture of the property is the report you receive. That is why the cadence and the format matter far more than the promises: dated photographs, what was checked, what was found, what was done, what remains open. A report that says “all good” every month is not a report. Ask to see a real one, with the numbers blanked, before you sign with anybody.
Some decisions cannot wait for your morning
Agree a figure below which the manager acts and above which they ask, and write it into the agreement. Set it too high and you learn about spending after the fact; too low and you are approving a light fitting from an airport lounge. Most owners settle this in one conversation and never think about it again, which is exactly why it deserves that one conversation.
Enquiries arrive on somebody else’s morning
Phuket does not draw its guests from one clock. A family in Sydney, a couple in Seoul and a German household booking their February escape do not write at the same hour. Between them they cover the day, so there is no single time zone, including yours, from which the inbox is quiet. Platforms that measure response time, Airbnb most explicitly, feed it into what gets shown to the next person searching. This is one of the few purely mechanical arguments for handing the job over: not that you could not answer well, but that you would have to be awake to do it. Nobody sustains that for a season while holding a job.
Trust is built by boring repetition
The same person visiting on the same day of the week, reporting in the same format, month after month. It is unglamorous and it is the whole product. If you want a cheap test of any manager, look at whether the third month’s report is as thorough as the first, and whether the photographs are taken from the same angles so you can actually compare them.
While you are asleep
What actually happens when something breaks at three in the morning.
Not a promise: the sequence, written down, so you can hold it against whatever anyone else describes.
The call does not come to you
The number in the house, on the listing and on the fridge door is ours, and it is answered on the island at the hour it rings. A guest standing in a dark villa needs somebody who can get an electrician moving tonight, not somebody who can email you and wait for your morning. We deal with owners in English and in French, and with everyone here in the language the situation requires.
Distance is measured in traffic, not on a map
We work across the whole island of Phuket. That sentence appears on every management website here and means nothing on its own, so here is what it costs us to say it. The road between Layan and Kamala is one journey in September and another in February, and the map does not tell you which one you are about to make. Thepkasattri and the bypass decide most of what happens north to south, and they decide it differently at eight in the morning than at eight at night. The Patong hill at two in the morning is quick in a way it never is at six in the evening. So before we take a property on we tell you which of our people is nearest to your gate, where that person actually sleeps, and how long they genuinely need to reach you at the hour you are asking about: the night figure and the high-season figure, not the convenient one. Ask the same of anyone else, and ask for the answer in writing.
It gets triaged before it gets escalated
Most calls at three in the morning are not emergencies. A tripped breaker, a router, a gate remote, a guest who cannot find the second aircon control. Those are solved on the phone or by somebody driving over before the guest has finished being annoyed. What is left after that filtering is the genuine failure, and it is a different conversation entirely, which is the point of having the filter.
We spend up to the limit you set, and stop at it
Below the threshold in your agreement we get a technician out and the property working, and the cost lands on your statement with the invoice attached. Above it, you get a message setting out what happened, what it will cost and what we recommend. Then we wait. Waiting is occasionally the wrong answer, which is precisely why the threshold is worth thinking about rather than accepting a default.
What we will always wake you for
Anything with your name going on a document, an insurance claim, the police, structural damage, or a decision that changes the property rather than repairing it. Those are yours, and no time zone is a reason for somebody else to take them. Where a guest’s stay was disrupted we also tell you before the review appears, not after you have read it.
Being fair about it
When a foreign owner does not need us at all.
We would rather say this here than have you find it out after signing something.
You are here more than you are away
If you spend most of the year in Phuket and you do not mind dealing with the house, most of what we sell you already have. Presence is the product. Paying somebody else for something you can supply yourself is simply a cost, and a manager who talks you out of that observation is selling rather than advising.
Somebody you genuinely trust already lives on the island
A sibling, a partner, a long-standing friend with keys and judgement. That arrangement works well for years in plenty of cases. It tends to fail quietly once the property starts earning, when a favour turns into a job nobody agreed to be paid for and neither side wants to raise it. Worth naming before it happens rather than after the friendship has absorbed it.
The property barely rents
If the house is mainly for your own use and takes a handful of bookings a year, a full management arrangement can cost more than it returns. What you probably need is somebody looking after an empty house: checks, cleaning, the pool and the garden, and a call when something is wrong. That is a smaller thing to ask for and it should be priced as one.
You already have a manager who reports properly
Itemised statements, receipts produced on request, questions answered within a day, and a property that looks the same in year three as it did in year one. That is the entire list. If you have all four, staying where you are is the right answer, and we will tell you so rather than manufacture a reason to move you.
Straight answers
Questions foreign owners ask us.
Can I own a villa in Phuket outright as a foreigner?
Do I need to be in Thailand to appoint a manager?
If you manage my villa, is the TM30 obligation still mine?
Can you pay my bills while I am away?
Do I need a Thai bank account to rent my property out?
Which languages do you deal with owners in?
What does the market analysis cover, and what does it cost?
Reviewed . We update these pages when the practice on the ground changes, not on a schedule.
Where to go next
Our services
- Villa management in Phuket
- Condo management in Phuket
- Airbnb management in Phuket
- All property management services
- Villa care for absentee owners in Phuket
- Rent out my villa in Phuket
- A second opinion on how your villa is being managed
- Villa maintenance and housekeeping in Phuket
- Home property management in Phuket
- About Phuket Property Manager
- Contact a property management company in Phuket
Guides for owners
- Employing villa staff in Phuket
- Off-plan villa handover in Phuket: the snagging inspection
- How to choose a property management company in Phuket
- Self-managing versus hiring a property manager in Phuket
- Short-term rental rules in Phuket: the 30-day question
- Your rental guarantee is ending. What now?
- Switching property manager in Phuket
- Property management fees in Phuket
- The true cost of running a villa in Phuket
- Mould and humidity in an empty villa in Phuket
- Water in a Phuket villa: the tank, the pump and the day it runs dry
- Salt corrosion in a coastal villa in Phuket
- Villa air conditioning in Phuket: servicing, faults and who pays
- Villa pool maintenance in the Phuket rainy season
Talk to the person who would look after your property.
No call centre, no sales team. We keep the portfolio small on purpose.