u/WorldlinessFuzzy2942

We are two German pensioners on Samui. We have one house, no business, no rental, no Thai income, and as of this year we are apparently a criminal enterprise.

[EDIT] because this has grown beyond what I expected. A number of comments here are using my story to make general statements about Thai people, or about Asians. I do not agree with any of it and I do not want it attached to what I wrote. My complaint is with one policy and how it is being applied, not with Thai people.

First our story, because it matters. Twelve years ago, after many trips to Ko Samui that we enjoyed, my wife and I decided to settle here. We built a house, and as it was finished we relocated here and sold our property in Germany.

Back then in 2014 it was more of a boots-on-the-ground process, at least for us. We found a plot with a "For sale" sign on it (in English!), we called, and it was an agent who put us in touch with a local lawyer. The lawyer told us that to buy land in Thailand we had to set up a special company. For everybody already screaming "it was illegal and you knew it": please read on, I will come to that.

The whole process at that time was very straightforward. 51% of the shares of the company were assigned to the lawyer himself and to one of his associates. That same associate sits as a shareholder in dozens of other companies. It was never a secret. It was the business model. He said it works more like a trust, that it is only for the land, and that we would have to pay for this service every year together with the audit and accounting fees. Which we still do today. Once the company was set up we had a meeting with the seller, a Thai family. We transferred the money and we all went together to the land office. The official checked the papers, took the fee, stamped it and wished us luck. It took forty minutes. Everybody in that room, the lawyers, the seller, the officials, knew exactly what was going on. We were not hiding. It looked normal. At the very same land office we even met another couple from the UK doing exactly the same thing through different lawyers, and we are still friends with them today.

Later we found a Thai architect and a construction company he recommended. We applied for and received a construction permit in my name. We never bribed anyone. After almost two long years (instead of the promised ten months), with the budget almost 150% over what we had planned, and after changing the construction company midway, our house was finished. We registered it, the house got its blue book, we got a yellow book with our names in it, and even foreigner "pink IDs". Again, the normal way, through the normal channels, without a single question.

We still live in this house. A couple of years ago we had to renovate it thoroughly, but for more than a decade it has been the only home we have. We built it the way we wanted to live in it, not the way you build something to sell. It is not a stack of bedrooms with ensuites. It has a very specific layout that only my wife and I understand, and I doubt there is a queue of buyers for that. We have never rented it out and never earned a single satang from it. We have never worked in Thailand, we have zero Thai-sourced income, and we have always been here on retirement visas.

Now, about whether we knew what a bad thing we were doing. I will not lie to you, I will tell you how it was and how it changed over time. At the time of the purchase it did not occur to me for a second that I was doing anything illegal. Firstly, in Germany the advice of a licensed lawyer protects you from legal mistakes to a certain extent, and it keeps the lawyer responsible. Secondly, believe it or not, at that time this was the standard way, offered everywhere, and it stayed that way until very recently. Nobody questioned it. It also looked fine to me logically. I still do not get why the shareholders my lawyer provided are called "nominees". For me a nominee is somebody you put in place to hide behind while you do something shady, and who might not even know that he is one. Mine are paid a fee they agreed to take, every year, with invoices. I sit in the same company holding 49% of the shares. I am on the building permit. My name is on the house. If I was hiding, I did the worst job in history.

But yes, I promised to be direct about "whether I understood". As Thai governments started to swap back and forth, I remember the first "crackdown". And yes, in expat circles the subject started to get discussed and I understood that it is a "grey" area. Not much more than that. To be honest, until very recently I was sure we were still on the safe side of it. We never did any rental, licensed or not, never any business, nothing like that. Quite the opposite: we kept investing and we even created a job. A wonderful Thai lady has been working for us as our maid for almost seven years now. We have maintenance contracts with Thai individuals and companies for the house. And we spend all of it here: our savings, and the returns they earn abroad. Our health insurance has paid a fortune into Thai hospitals for us. I must admit that we failed to learn Thai properly, but we tried twice, I swear! Overall, I cannot see the angle in which we did anything bad for this country.

I was sure that if a government tolerates this kind of setup for decades, allows people from all over the world to buy property this way and accepts their investment, it cannot suddenly become a criminal offence. The whole economy profited from it. I kept telling my buddies here: do not do unlicensed Airbnb, do not get involved in business, and you will be fine. My thinking even got its confirmation in June 2024, when the cabinet approved a study of a 99-year lease model. We waited for it. We planned to convert the day it landed. In September 2025 the new government quietly shelved it, because there was "insufficient time". So the legal door I was told to wait for was closed by the same people who now tell me that I used the wrong door.

It is important to mention that a 30-year leasehold in its current form would not be an option for us, and it is not an option for many families. As I said, in our case this is not an investment where we planned to take a quick return and then write it off, and it is not a holiday home. It is our only home. If I had leased in 2014 (and I swear, at that time nobody even discussed it!) my lease would run out when we are in our late eighties. That is not an age at which you can deal with something like this.

The last few months have been like a nightmare. When you read the numbers in the reports, and they say that of roughly 12,900 companies registered on this island more than 8,200 have foreign shareholders, that speaks for itself. I do not understand how a person with a brain can look at these numbers and not see what they say. It is not a hidden offence that somebody could overlook and that "offenders" could hide. It is not a case of bad foreigners tricking the government. It just proves my story: this was a multi-level government system, everybody knew, the officials allowed it, and everybody profited. But then I open the local Thai groups and read the comments, and people are celebrating. They are asking what kind of punishment awaits us foreigners who did this. They support it completely, and every next crackdown "report" gets more bizarre. Now I read that the authorities are going to look into the leasehold model, because it "allows foreigners to control land for decades". What the f*ck? Isn't that exactly what a lease is by design?

And it does not stop there. The Land Department's own screening list from May tells the land offices to look at Thai spouses, at minor children, at usufructs, at powers of attorney, and at companies with foreign-sounding names. This week I read that they have started investigating naturalised Thai citizens as nominees, and that changing the naturalisation law is being considered. So the answer to "then become Thai" is now also under review. And since the first of August the DBD stamps the shareholder list it issues with a note saying that the registrar does not certify that it is accurate. That is the state's own document, about the state's own register.

The anti-foreigner agenda is spreading like mould, and within a matter of months I do not feel welcome in the place I call home. I have a clear feeling that all of a sudden my wife and I became witches, and that a witch hunt is happening around us.

And let me tell you what happens if we lose, because I had to look that up myself. Under the Land Code the Director-General orders the land sold within 180 days to a year, and I get the money back minus a 5% fee. That is today. In February the cabinet took up a proposal to change it so that the land simply goes to the State and I get nothing. In July the Ombudsman proposed treating all of this as money laundering, which brings asset seizure with it. So the punishment is still being written while the arrests are already running.

And here is the part nobody has explained to me. The house is legally mine. Foreigners can own buildings in Thailand, the permit is in my name, that part was never grey. Only the land under it is the problem. So when they force the sale, some Thai buyer gets a plot of land with a German's house standing on it. With an unusual layout and a playroom for grandchildren. Good luck to everybody involved.

And I am not asking for forgiveness or a free pass. Give me a registered lease for whatever years I have left. Charge a fee for it. Tax it. Fine me. I will pay, and so will almost everybody I know in this situation. What I cannot do is comply with a rule that does not exist yet. There is no amnesty, no grandfathering, no window, nothing in any published draft. Name the price and most of us would pay it tomorrow.

So, as the title says, I really want to ask the Thai people of this sub a question. Even if you are not one of those celebrating on Facebook: do you understand what this policy has already done, and what is going to happen next? If our house gets taken, we leave, and we never come back. Neither we nor many of our friends in the same position will play games with another workaround or with bribes. We will simply be gone. And do not ask where we go back to. We sold that house to build this one.

And we will not go alone. To name just a few: our maid loses her job after seven years. The gardener, the pool guy, the electrician, the aircon company, the accountant who has been billing us every year for a company that the state now says should never have existed, all of them lose a customer. Our insurance stops paying Thai hospitals. And the Thai family who sold us that land in 2014, in front of a government official who stamped the papers and took the fee, what are they now? Criminals too? Or is it only us?

So tell me what you actually win. I heard a theory that foreigners pushed the prices up until locals could not buy any more. Nobody was robbed. Thai families sold this land, at prices they named themselves, to buyers they met face to face, in a government office, and they took the money and went home. Ours did. And it is the children of those families who cannot sell today.

Because when a forced sale happens, who is standing there with the cash? By most estimates nine out of ten villa buyers on this island are foreign, and foreigners have just been shown what their paperwork is worth. So a house like ours goes for a fraction of what it cost to build, and whoever picks it up is the one with money and patience, and let us be honest, sometimes the one who knew the raid was coming. That is not land going back to poor local Thai people. That is land changing hands cheaply.

One thing did make me laugh recently, in a bad way. This weekend the residents of Bang Rak, Thai people, not foreigners, stood in their own road holding a banner asking whether it could please be put back the way it was. Roadworks that drag on and on, dangerous for traffic, killing every business on that stretch. I drive it several times a week. It has been a mess for over a year. So the same administration that can put three hundred officers, five agencies and a press conference onto a villa raid in a single morning cannot finish one beach road. And that is the machine we are told will now take custody of a few thousand houses. Uff.

And what is really being destroyed here is not the property market. It is the worth of a Thai signature. A stamp from a Thai land office, a company registered by a Thai registrar, the written advice of a Thai licensed lawyer: all of it turned out to mean nothing twelve years later. You are not chasing away an enemy. You are chasing away the people who brought their money here, spent it here, employed your people, paid your hospitals and never asked your state for one single baht.

So what is the reason for all the applause and celebration on Facebook? I really do not get it. Take the house. Just do not act surprised in a few years when the only people left to sell to are each other.

P.S. And one thing for the foreigners reading this who are still thinking about buying here, or who believe a lease keeps them safe. At a press conference this weekend an official said that leaseholds need to be checked, because they allow foreigners to control land for decades (what a surprise!). Until now that was the absolutely safe way, and I cannot get my head around it. You already know my story. There was another setup that was widely offered and considered legal too, not long ago: the 30+30+30 leasehold. That one was killed by a Supreme Court decision. Now the Land Department circular from May puts usufructs, superficies, powers of attorney, Thai spouses and minor children on the same checklist. So before you sign anything, ask yourself not whether it is legal this month, but whether the same institutions telling you it is fine will still be saying that in twelve years. They told me.