First of all, the purchase process will depend on the property itself, or rather on the availability of ownership rights - chanote for it. With chanote - registration at the Land Department; before receiving Chanote, by contract - we register with the Developer.
Also, online registration differs from registration with personal participation.
In this article, we will consider all these options when buying an apartment.
Step 1. Property selection.
You choose a property on the website, or leave us a request with your purchase criteria. After that, our manager will select several projects for you within your budget and apartment preferences, and send them to your email.
Step 2. To fly or not to fly.
The choice is difficult: on one hand - a foreign country, unfamiliar agencies, on the other hand - these are expenses for flights, accommodation and simply expenses for the time of the transaction.
In this case, you can buy faster, and sometimes cheaper (when the owner needs to sell urgently, the price is noticeably lower), and save on flights and accommodation.
For your first purchase, we still recommend flying to see how everything will happen. Or ask your good acquaintances to be present at the transaction as witnesses.
Step 3. Deposit
Further, the purchase process will change depending on your decision to fly or not.
Option A: online transaction
You decided not to fly, but you need to view the apartment you chose on the website or from the list sent to you by our manager. We go to the selected project and make a full video, starting with the project itself and ending with the apartment itself. Usually this is done online, i.e. through any convenient messenger, like Skype. At the same time, you can ask the manager to look in detail at the view from the window, room layout, kitchen equipment, check the plumbing, etc., depending on what you need to check before buying.
After viewing, if everything suits you, we prepare a deposit agreement to remove the apartment from sale and transfer the deposit to the owner so that he does not sell this apartment to third parties during the specified period. The deposit, as a rule, is 5% of the purchase amount, sometimes round sums are used: 50 or 100 thousand baht, depending on the cost of the apartment, transaction terms, and demand for the apartment.
We send you this agreement along with an invoice for the bank, according to which you will need to send a deposit to our company's bank account. These documents are necessary to obtain a certificate of money transfer from abroad.
Attention:* to purchase an apartment in Thailand in a foreign name, it is necessary to show a certificate from the bank that the money was transferred from abroad. To do this, when sending a deposit or full amount, you need to show this agreement or purchase and sale contract at the bank, and also indicate the reason for sending money: for the purchase of apartment number XXX in project XXX. Then, when receiving chanote or re-registering chanote, Thai banks will provide you with this statement without problems. We handle obtaining this certificate ourselves, but in most cases, the personal presence of the buyer is necessary.*
Option B: personal presence at the transaction
In this case, you will need to fly to the country to choose an apartment on site. This is an additional expense, but you can already view apartments on site and immediately discuss all transaction conditions.
Then a deposit is made for the selected apartment. Again, with an invoice and deposit agreement.
Step 4. Sending the main amount to Thailand
We prepare a tripartite purchase and sale contract "Buyer-Agent-Seller", where all previously agreed conditions and terms are specified. The agency in this case acts as a guarantor of the "clean" transaction and the "money transfer-registration" procedure. All ownership documents are checked (address, square meters, name in chanote). A certificate is ordered from the legal office of the condominium stating that there are no encumbrances on the apartment (bank mortgages, debts for electricity, water, utility services, rental agreements, etc.), and that the apartment is in foreign/Thai ownership. After preparing the contract and receiving all necessary certificates for the apartment, the Agency prepares an invoice for payment of the remaining amount.
With Option A, i.e. a remote transaction, the entire remaining amount is sent to the company's account, with a mandatory note "for the purchase of an apartment", as mentioned earlier.
With personal presence, our company helps in opening a bank account in the buyer's name to send the remaining amount to their own account in a Thai bank.
Or, as in Option A, you can also send money to the real estate agency's account, and then we handle all the certificates for the Land Department ourselves.
Step 5 and final. Receiving the long-awaited keys and ownership rights
With a remote transaction, you only need to wait for the preparation of documents and receipt of money to the company's account (international transfer takes 3-5 business days). Next, the Seller and the Agency representing the Buyer meet at the Developer's office. The transfer tax is paid (usually 2% of the assessed value - not the sale price of the apartment). This tax is divided equally between the Buyer and Seller. Then the Developer re-registers the contract to the new buyer, and the Agent transfers the remaining amount to the Seller.
Option B with personal presence proceeds approximately according to the same scenario if re-registration takes place at the Developer's office (when Chanote has not yet been issued). To register ownership at the Land Department, i.e. re-register an apartment with already received Chanote, first a transaction day is scheduled when both parties can fly to Thailand for apartment registration. By this day X, our company prepares all necessary documents and certificates, and we cash out the remaining amount for the Seller (or a bank check in the Seller's name).
Re-registration at the Land Department occurs only in the presence of all 3 parties. The re-registration process, payment of the 6.3% fee and transfer of money and keys all happen there.
There are many ways to send money to Thailand: from bank transfers to bringing cash, or even payment in cryptocurrency. We will talk about this in the next article on the website and publish it on our social networks. Therefore, we advise those who plan to purchase property in Thailand to subscribe so as not to miss this important information. If you don't follow the news often, it's better to leave us your email with the note INFO, and we will duplicate it to your email so you can save all the information in one place and read it in your free time.
