How to Find a Good Property Agent in Thailand

There is no agent licence in Thailand to check

Start here, because it changes every other check you make. Thailand has no compulsory nationwide licence for property agents. There is no public register you can look a person up on, no number for them to quote you, and no professional body whose approval is required before someone takes on the sale of your home. Anyone can order a business card and start calling owners.

Voluntary associations do exist, and membership of one is a mild positive — it usually means somebody has paid a subscription and signed up to a code of conduct. It is not a licence, nobody is obliged to hold it, and it tells you nothing about whether the person has ever completed a sale.

What can be verified is the company behind the agent. A brokerage operating properly is a registered Thai company, and company registrations are a matter of public record through the Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Business Development. That confirms the business exists, who stands behind it and how long it has been trading. It does not tell you the individual in front of you is any good. For that you need their transaction record, which is the rest of this article.

Treat any site or agent claiming to be licence-checked or government-approved with real suspicion. There is nothing to check against, so the claim is either loose language or a deliberate one.

Judge them on completed sales, not on listings

A listing count measures how many owners an agent has persuaded to sign, not how many buyers they have found. In Thailand the gap between those two numbers is unusually wide, because open listings are the norm and a single condominium can sit on half a dozen agencies’ books at the same time. An agent with a vast portfolio and a handful of completions in a year is a marketing channel rather than a seller, and you will discover which one you have hired months into the process.

The question that separates them is narrow and specific: which units in this building — or on this street, if you are selling a house — have you personally completed in the last twelve months, and roughly when? An agent who works your area answers straight away, with the project name, the month, the unit type and something about what the buyer was after. An agent who does not will move to generalities about the market, their agency’s reach, or how many enquiries they get.

They cannot give you a buyer’s name and you should not ask. The building, the approximate date, the size of unit and whether it was a Thai or overseas buyer are all fair, and none of it is confidential in any way that should trouble a working agent.

Ask the harder version too: what have you had on in this building that did not sell, and why? The answer is more informative than the successes. Someone who says a unit sat for months because the owner insisted on a price the last two sales did not support is telling you they will argue with you when it matters. That is the person you want.

The questions to ask before you sign anything

Have this conversation with two or three agents before you commit to any of them, and have it by phone or in person rather than by message. You are testing how quickly and how specifically they answer, which does not survive being drafted.

• Which units in my building or on my street have you completed in the last twelve months, and roughly when?
• Where will my listing actually appear — which portals, in which languages, and under whose name?
• Will you photograph the property yourself or send someone, and when?
• Is this a sole agency or an open listing, and if sole, for how long and ending on what date?
• What checks do you run before marketing begins — the title deed, the juristic person’s debt-free position, the building’s remaining foreign ownership quota?
• Who drafts the sale and purchase agreement, and who holds the buyer’s deposit until transfer?
• Who from your side attends the Land Office on the day, and what happens if I cannot be there in person?
• What do you need from me, and by when, so nothing stalls at the appointment?
• If a buyer approaches me directly, how is that handled under our agreement?

Sole agency, open listings and the fee

There are broadly two ways to sell. An open listing puts your property with as many agents as will take it. It feels like maximum exposure and often produces the opposite: the same unit appears repeatedly across the portals, sometimes at different asking prices and with different photographs, and a buyer scrolling through reads that as either a duplicate to skip or an owner who does not know what the property is worth. Nobody owns the outcome, so nobody invests in it.

A sole agency gives one party accountability, which is worth having if — and only if — you bind them to something. Insist on a fixed end date rather than a rolling term, a written list of what marketing they will actually do, and a named individual rather than an agency. Agree in advance what happens if it expires with no sale, and make sure it expires automatically rather than renewing unless you object.

On the fee: no ministry, no Land Office and no professional body sets what an agent charges in Thailand. It is negotiated between you and the brokerage, and whatever you agree belongs in writing before any marketing begins — the rate, what it is calculated on, at what point it becomes payable, whether it is inclusive of tax, and how it is split if two agencies are involved in the same deal. Ask for the brokerage’s standard terms as a document and read them; an agent who will not put the basis of their fee in writing before starting work is showing you how the rest of the sale will go.

The costs of transfer itself are a separate matter and are not the agent’s to set either. The amounts payable on the day are determined by the Land Office and the Revenue Department against your particular title and your circumstances as owner. Which side bears each of them is a matter for negotiation and for the contract. Get the actual figures for your own title from the local Land Office, or from a lawyer, before you agree any split with a buyer — not from an agent’s rule of thumb, and not from an article.

Extra ground to cover if you are a foreign owner

Selling as an overseas owner adds steps that an agent who only ever deals with domestic buyers may never have handled, and the time to find that out is before you sign, not the week before transfer.

If you hold a condominium on foreign freehold, whether your buyer can take it on the same basis depends on the building’s remaining foreign quota under the Condominium Act. A Thai buyer does not consume any of it; an overseas buyer does. Your agent should know where the building currently stands and should be able to have the juristic person confirm it in writing, because a buyer who has been told the wrong thing will walk at the worst possible moment.

Where the buyer is bringing money from abroad, the funds have to arrive in foreign currency and be converted by a Thai bank, which then issues the evidence the Land Office expects to see at registration. That is the buyer’s bank’s responsibility rather than yours, but a competent agent knows the requirement exists and chases it in the weeks before the appointment rather than discovering it on the morning. Ask any agent to explain that process back to you; it is a quick test of whether they have handled an overseas buyer before.

For your own proceeds, keep every document from your original purchase and ask your bank directly what it will want to see before remitting funds out. Those requirements are the bank’s and the Bank of Thailand’s, not the agent’s, and are worth confirming early.

Finally, ask what happens if you cannot attend the Land Office yourself. Selling remotely is routine, but it depends on a power of attorney prepared, signed and certified in the form the office will accept, sometimes through a Thai embassy abroad. That takes weeks. An agent who has done it before will raise it unprompted.

How agents are screened on this site

Since the advice above is to check agents rather than trust anyone’s badge, it is only fair to say what our own screening does and does not amount to.

We do not licence-check agents, because there is no licence to check. What we do instead is narrower and verifiable: every agent listed works for a company-registered brokerage, and the shortlist you are shown is ordered by where they actually work and by their record of completed transactions in that area — not by who pays most, and not by listing count.

If nobody on our roster is based in the area you ask about, the search widens rather than returning you an empty page: first to neighbouring areas, then to the region, then nationally. When it widens, it says so on the page. A shortlist labelled as regional is exactly that, and you should read it accordingly.

Transaction counts appear as bands rather than exact figures. The numbers behind them come from periodic roll-ups of completed deals rather than a live feed, so a precise count would claim an accuracy it does not have and would be wrong the day after publication. A band stays true longer and is what most people read it as anyway.

And the ordering is within our own roster, not across the Thai market as a whole — nobody has a complete picture of that, and any site claiming otherwise is overstating what it can see. Treat a shortlist here as a starting point and then do the work in this article yourself. The agent who can name the last three units they closed in your building, and tell you what the one that failed taught them, is the one worth your time, whether you found them through us or on a noticeboard in the lobby.