How foreigners can own property

For years the nominee company was treated as a grey area: technically illegal, rarely enforced, quietly sold on every island in the south. That era is over. Since late 2024 the Thai authorities have run a coordinated crackdown on nominee land ownership, and it has been moving toward Lanta, not away.

It began on Koh Samui and Koh Phangan, where by some counts two thirds of all registered companies had a foreign shareholder, and it has since worked down the Andaman coast through Phuket and Phang Nga and into Krabi, the province Koh Lanta belongs to. Investigators have raided the law and accounting offices that mass-produced these companies, some of which had registered a hundred or more shells for foreign clients, and have inspected and seized land worth well over a billion baht. Thai and foreign owners alike have been arrested. Several agencies now work the same files together, from the Department of Special Investigation to the Land Department to the anti-money-laundering office, sharing data instead of raiding in isolation.

The screening has tightened at the same time. A new company with a foreign shareholder now faces checks meant to prove the Thai partners paid for their own shares; officials are told to trace who actually owns and controls a company rather than accept the 51/49 split on its face; and large land purchases are flagged automatically for a look at where the money came from. As one Bangkok firm following it closely puts it, the question is no longer whether a nominee structure will be examined, but when.

Being caught is not a fine and a shrug. A confirmed nominee holding triggers a forced sale: the owner has somewhere between 180 days and a year to sell, and if they do not, the Land Department can sell the land for them and keep a slice of the proceeds. Both sides face criminal charges, the Thai nominee and the foreigner who used them, and the foreigner can be deported and blacklisted on top. And the paperwork meant to protect you protects nothing, because a Thai court will not enforce an illegal arrangement: if your nominee, their heirs or their next spouse simply keeps the house, you have no claim a court will hear.

The direction of travel is one way, too. Lawmakers are studying a change that would stop paying the foreigner the sale proceeds at all and instead forfeit the land to the State. That is a proposal, not law, as of 2026. But nobody is drafting rules to make this route safer, and that tells you which way to plan.

A Thai spouse can own land freely, including while married to a foreigner, and plenty of houses on Lanta are held this way. It is entirely legal. It is also not the same thing as you owning it, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what it costs you.

At the transfer, the Land Office asks both of you to sign a declaration that the money used is the Thai spouse's own personal property, held or earned separately, and not shared marital property. Thai law treats those as two different things: sin suan tua, which is yours alone, and sin somros, which the marriage shares. Signing that the money was separate property is the price of the transaction, and it means what it says. In law the land is your spouse's, not half yours, and you are signing away any ownership claim to it, any default share of it if you divorce, and any automatic right to inherit it.

Be careful how bulletproof that declaration is made to sound. It does its main job well, which is to keep a foreigner's name off the land at the Land Office. It is not a promise that a Thai court will never look behind the label later. If a divorce or an inheritance turns on whose money really bought the house, the court applies its own tests to the facts, not just to what the form said. And since 2026 the Land Department has singled out Thai-spouse purchases for exactly this scrutiny, checking whether the funds were genuinely the Thai spouse's own and not a quiet transfer from the foreign partner.

What actually protects you is what you register alongside the purchase, in your own name, on the deed:

• A superficies lets you own the house itself even though the land is your spouse's, and it can be inherited. This is how a foreigner comes to genuinely own the building on family land.
• A usufruct gives you the registered right to live in and use the property for life. It is personal, so it ends when you die and cannot be passed on, but while you are alive your spouse cannot sell the house out from under you.
• A will, because marriage gives a foreign spouse no automatic right to inherit Thai land. A foreign heir generally still cannot keep the land itself and would have to sell it, but a will decides who the house and the registered rights pass to.

Ask for these while everyone is happy and the answer is yes, and register them at the Land Office rather than leave them in a drawer: only a registered right binds anyone other than the person who signed it. Nobody has ever regretted registering one.