How to Sell Your Phuket Property as a Foreigner
Selling property in Phuket as a foreigner is a fundamentally different process from buying it, and far fewer guides cover it well. Phuket’s resale market actually held up better than almost anywhere else in Thailand through 2025: in the first nine months of the year, the island recorded 7,915 property transfers worth ฿28 billion, up 8.5% in volume and 7.8% in value year on year, even as the national market contracted by roughly 9%, according to Bangkok Post’s reporting on Real Estate Information Center data. Phuket was one of only three provinces nationally to post growth on both measures, a notably different backdrop than the soft-market headlines suggest.
What actually trips up foreign sellers is rarely the market itself. It is the paperwork: which legal structure you hold, which taxes apply to your specific case, and how to get your proceeds out of Thailand once the sale closes. This guide works through each of those, in the order a seller actually needs them.
Your Exit Route Depends on How You Bought
Before you set a price or call an agent, identify exactly what you are legally selling. The structure you used to acquire the property: freehold condominium, registered leasehold, or a Thai company holding, determines who can buy it from you, what actually transfers at the Land Department, and how long the process realistically takes.
Selling a Freehold Condominium
A freehold condo is the cleanest property to sell in Phuket. Your name sits on the Chanote, the title deed, and ownership transfers directly to the buyer at the Land Department, the same way it was transferred to you when you bought.
The detail that catches sellers out is the foreign ownership quota. Thai law caps foreign ownership at 49% of a condominium project’s total saleable floor area. If your building is already near that ceiling, your buyer pool narrows to Thai nationals, or to a foreigner buying on leasehold instead of freehold, which is a different transaction entirely. Confirm the building’s current foreign quota with the juristic office before you start marketing the unit; it should be one of the first calls you, or Anan’s condo sales specialists, make.
Selling a Leasehold Villa or House
A villa or house on leased land works differently. You are not transferring land ownership, since you never held it. You are assigning your registered lease and transferring ownership of the structure itself to the new owner, both of which need to be re-registered at the Land Department.
This is where the March 2025 Supreme Court ruling on ‘30+30+30’ leases matters most to a seller, not a buyer. The court confirmed that pre-agreed automatic renewal clauses are not enforceable; only the initial 30-year registered term carries a guarantee. A buyer’s lawyer will now look closely at exactly how many years remain on your specific lease, and a villa with 8 years left on its original term will not command the same price as one with 25. If your lease was structured some years ago, it is worth reading our guide to Thailand’s 30+30+30 leasehold agreements before you set an asking price, and worth talking to Anan’s villa sales team about how buyers in your area are currently pricing remaining term.
Which exit route applies to you
| Ownership Route | What Transfers | Buyer Pool | Key Consideration |
| Freehold Condominium | Title deed (Chanote) transfers directly | Thai or foreign, within quota | Confirm remaining foreign quota first |
| Leasehold Villa or House | Registered lease assignment plus building ownership | Primarily foreign buyers | Remaining lease term now drives price |
| Thai Company Holding | Often company shares, not the title itself | Narrower, specialist buyers | Needs separate corporate due diligence |
Pricing It Right in Today’s Market
Phuket’s resale market is active, but far from undifferentiated. Pricing still varies sharply by area, property type, and how realistic the original asking price was.
Two inputs matter more than anything else when you set a price. The first is an independent appraisal, not the figure a developer quoted you years ago, not the asking price of a similar villa down the road, but a current valuation from someone with no stake in the outcome. A professional property appraisal gives you a defensible number to start from, and it is close to the figure your buyer’s bank or due-diligence lawyer will likely arrive at independently, so starting near it tends to shorten negotiations rather than lengthen them.
The second is the live market itself. Before confirming an asking price, spend twenty minutes looking through current Phuket listings in your area and property type. Sellers who price against six-month-old comparables, or against what a similar unit achieved at the top of the market, routinely sit unsold for months while equivalent properties priced against today’s market move.
Taxes and Fees You Will Pay at the Land Department
Four charges are settled at the Land Department when a Phuket property changes hands, and as the seller, three of them are typically yours to pay.
The transfer fee is 2% of whichever is higher, the official appraised value or the agreed sale price, conventionally split 50/50 between buyer and seller, though the split is negotiable and should be written into the sale agreement rather than assumed. A temporary measure has cut this fee to 0.01% for qualifying homes up to ฿7 million through June 2026, but only where the buyer is a Thai national meeting the programme’s criteria; it does not reduce a foreign seller’s own obligations, so confirm its current status with your lawyer.
Specific Business Tax and stamp duty are mutually exclusive; you pay one or the other, never both. If you have owned the property for less than five years, Specific Business Tax applies at 3.3% of the higher of appraised value or sale price. Hold past the five-year mark, and the rate drops to a 0.5% stamp duty instead, according to Siam Legal International’s overview of Thai property transfer taxes. On a ฿20 million villa, that difference alone is roughly ฿560,000, which is worth factoring into your timing if a sale is not urgent.
Withholding tax is the most misunderstood of the three. It is not a Thai capital gains tax, since Thailand does not maintain one as a separate category for individual sellers. It is an advance payment of income tax, calculated on the appraised value after a deduction tied to how many years you owned the property, then taxed at Thailand’s progressive personal income rates. The exact figure depends on your specific holding period and the property’s appraised value, so have your lawyer or accountant run the calculation before you agree a net price with a buyer, rather than after.
Getting Your Money Out of Thailand
This is the step most buying guides skip entirely, and it is the one that causes the most stress for foreign sellers. Thailand does not restrict you from sending your sale proceeds abroad, but Thai banks need a documented trail before they will process the outward transfer.
If you originally bought your property as a freehold condominium, you should already hold a Foreign Exchange Transaction form, sometimes still called by its older name, the Thor Tor 3, issued when you first brought funds into Thailand to complete the purchase. We cover what this document actually is and why it matters in our complete breakdown of the FETF form. Keep the original. When you come to repatriate your sale proceeds, your bank will typically ask for that original FET form alongside the Land Department’s transfer documents and your withholding tax receipt. Without the original, even a fully legitimate transfer can be delayed for weeks while the bank verifies the source of funds.
Major Thai banks, Bangkok Bank, Kasikornbank, and SCB, among the most commonly used by foreign owners, are well practised at this process, but none will skip the documentation step. Our guide to repatriating your sale proceeds covers the sequence in more detail, including how repatriating profit above your original FET figure is handled differently from repatriating the original capital.
The Selling Process Step by Step
Once you know your structure, your price, and your tax position, the sequence itself is straightforward.
- Get an independent appraisal. Before you set a price or speak to an agent, know the defensible number a lawyer or bank would also arrive at.
- Engage your own lawyer, not the buyer’s. Your lawyer drafts or reviews the listing and sale agreements, confirms what taxes you will owe, and protects your interests through the transfer.
- List and market the property. Professional photography, accurate floor plans, and pricing against live comparables, not last year’s market, shorten time on market significantly.
- Negotiate and sign a reservation agreement. A reservation fee, typically a small percentage of the price, holds the buyer’s commitment while contracts are finalised.
- Sign the Sale and Purchase Agreement. This document fixes the price, the tax split, and the transfer timeline. Have your lawyer review every clause before you sign.
- Settle taxes and transfer at the Land Department. Transfer fee, Specific Business Tax or stamp duty, and withholding tax are calculated and paid at this appointment, and ownership formally changes hands.
- Repatriate your proceeds. With your original FET form, the Land Department’s transfer paperwork, and your tax receipts in hand, your bank can process the outward transfer.
Mistakes That Cost Foreign Sellers Money
A handful of avoidable errors account for most of the friction we see foreign sellers run into across Phuket:
- Assuming a ‘30+30+30’ lease guarantees 90 years to a buyer. Since March 2025, it guarantees 30, and pricing the remaining term as if it were longer invites a renegotiation at the worst possible moment.
- Skipping an independent appraisal and pricing off a developer’s original sale price from years earlier.
- Not confirming the building’s foreign quota before marketing a freehold condo to international buyers, then losing weeks when a sale stalls at due diligence.
- Losing or misplacing the original FET form from the original purchase, then discovering at repatriation time that reconstructing it takes far longer than the sale itself did.
- Agreeing a net to seller price without first confirming who pays Specific Business Tax or stamp duty, then absorbing a cost that was never priced in.
- Selling through a Thai company structure without recognising that the buyer may be purchasing company shares, not the property directly, a transaction your standard lawyer fees and timeline may not account for.
Final Steps to Selling Your Phuket Property
Phuket’s current market rewards sellers who treat the exit as seriously as they treated the purchase. The mechanics differ depending on what you hold, freehold condominium, leasehold villa, or company structure, but the discipline is the same throughout: get an independent valuation, confirm your tax position before negotiating a net price, and keep your original FET documentation somewhere you can actually find it.
Anan Property Group works with foreign owners across Phuket through exactly this process, from the first valuation conversation through to a completed transfer and a clean repatriation. If you are weighing whether now is the right time to sell, that conversation is worth having before you fix a price, not after.
