Bangkok or Phuket: which Thai property market is yours

Thailand’s Condominium Act does not care which province you buy in. A foreign buyer can hold a condominium unit freehold, registered in their own name, provided the building stays within its 49 percent foreign-ownership quota by saleable area. That is as true on Kamala Beach as it is on Wireless Road. Anyone telling you that island property is somehow a lesser form of ownership is describing villas, not condominiums. Our guide to what a foreigner can own in Thailand sets out the mechanics.

The difference is not the law. It is the stock. Bangkok’s market is overwhelmingly condominiums, so the quota route covers most of what a buyer would want, and the freehold question is usually settled before it is asked. Much of what draws people to Phuket is villas, and a foreigner cannot own land in Thailand in their own name. So a villa is typically a 30-year registered lease, sometimes with renewal options whose value depends entirely on their wording and on who holds the freehold underneath.

A 30-year lease is a 30-year lease. It can be the right answer, and often is, but it is a different asset from a freehold title and should be priced as one.

The clearest worked example on the island sits at Kamala Residences, where thirteen villas are offered as eight freehold and five leasehold at matching specification, which lets a buyer see what the two tenures cost against each other rather than argue about it in the abstract. The Phuket guide covers the shores and the projects in detail. Have the structure examined before the architecture.

For Bangkok we publish real numbers. The Bangkok Price Index is built from asking prices and asking rents we observe building by building across the central corridors, deduplicated, and it refuses to publish a corridor unless both sides carry at least twenty observations. As of July 2026 it puts gross yield at asking between 3.7 percent in Sathorn and 4.1 percent on the Riverside. That is the market-wide median, and on its own it under-describes what a buyer who chooses well can reach.

Split the same ledger by tenure and the range opens up. Across freehold buildings the median is 3.8 percent and the best reach 5.1. Across leasehold buildings the median is 6.2 percent, and five of the seven we can measure clear 6, with Sindhorn Kempinski at 7.8.

For Phuket we quote one market range with its source, Knight Frank Thailand’s 2024 year-end figures of 5 to 8 per cent a year for condominiums and 10 to 15 for villas, before costs, and otherwise quote building by building. We publish no average of our own: on this coast the average is the wrong instrument. Bangkok is one homogeneous rental market with year-round tenants, which is why a corridor median means something.

Phuket is at least three markets wearing one name. A villa in a managed rental pool, a villa let privately by the season, and a condominium on a long lease to a resident behave nothing like each other, and the gap between high season and low is the whole argument. Average them and you get a number that describes no property anyone actually owns.

So we ask the operator for the building’s own occupancy and achieved rates, low season included, and we work from that. Where a developer or an operator will not produce it, that is itself the answer.

Projected and guaranteed-return figures are common in island marketing material, and a guarantee is a price concession wearing a yield’s clothing: it is funded out of the purchase price, and it ends. Ask us about a specific building on the coast and you will get its real numbers. Ask us for the island’s average and you will get Knight Frank’s range with its date, and why it describes no single building.

Central Bangkok trades as finished condominium floor area in a dense city. Phuket’s headline prices are usually villas, on land, with a pool and a sea view. Those are not the same product, and dividing either by its floor area produces a number that proves whichever case you started with. The useful comparison is the total cost of the thing you actually want, and what tenure sits underneath it.

If the purchase has to earn, Bangkok, because it has a year-round tenant market and because we can show you what it currently asks. If the purchase is somewhere you intend to be, Phuket answers a question Bangkok does not, and the honest way to buy there is to settle the tenure first and treat any rental income as a bonus rather than a plan. Buyers who want both usually start with the Bangkok purchase, because it is the one that funds itself.