Why Your Property Isn’t Selling in Thailand

First work out where the sale is dying

A property that will not sell is not one problem. It is three or four different problems that look identical from where the owner is standing, and the entire job of this article is to tell them apart. Before changing anything, ask your agent for the numbers behind the listing and read them as a funnel: how many enquiries has it produced, how many of those became viewings, and how many viewings led to a second visit or an offer.

If almost nobody enquires, buyers are either not seeing the property at all or are ruling it out from a thumbnail and a number. That is an exposure and pricing problem, and nothing inside the unit is relevant yet — you could regrout every bathroom in the building and change nothing.

If enquiries arrive but viewings do not follow them, something is failing between the message and the appointment. Usually it is response time. Sometimes it is that the unit cannot actually be shown at any hour the buyer is free, which is its own section further down.

If people view steadily and nobody comes back, the property is under-delivering against what the listing promised, or the price is defensible on paper and wrong once somebody is standing in the room. This is the diagnosis most often got wrong, because it feels like a pricing problem and is frequently a photography or a disclosure problem wearing a pricing problem’s clothes.

And if offers arrive and then dissolve, the sale is dying in the checks rather than in the marketing — the title, arrears with the building, the ownership basis, a lease or a mortgage nobody mentioned at the start. That is a different failure with different fixes, and it is worth naming so you do not spend three months rewriting an advert that was working.

• Enquiries in the last month, broken down by portal rather than given as one total
• Viewings arranged, viewings that actually took place, and viewings cancelled by your side
• Written feedback in the buyer’s own words, not the agent’s summary of it
• Second viewings, which are the only leading indicator of an offer worth having
• Every offer received — including any the agent turned down for you without ringing first

You are probably priced against other people’s asking prices

There is no public register of achieved sale prices in Thailand that an owner or a buyer can search. What anybody can see is what other units are advertised at. So when a number gets set — by an agent, by an owner, or by the two of them talking each other into it — it is almost always set by looking up the tower at what is currently listed and choosing a figure somewhere in among them.

The problem is what that list is made of. Units that were priced correctly have already gone and left it. What remains is weighted towards the ones nobody was ever going to pay for, and each of them props up the next. Price into that queue and you have joined it rather than beaten it, and every month you sit there you become one of the stale comparables holding up somebody else.

The evidence that counts is what has completed. An agency that genuinely works your building has it, because somebody from their office was at the Land Office when it happened. Ask which units they closed, on what floor, in what layout and condition, and what the buyer refused to pay. If what comes back is a price per square metre for the district, you have been handed an average of a market that does not contain your unit.

Two other numbers distort an owner’s thinking and both are worth saying plainly. The Land Department’s appraised value for the unit is not a market valuation and was never meant to be one: it exists so the amounts payable at registration can be calculated, and it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with what any buyer will offer. And what you paid, plus what you have spent, plus what you still owe the bank, is not a price. It is your position, and the market has no interest in your position.

Then there is the mechanical part of how people search. Nobody browses a portal from the top. They set a maximum and everything above it simply does not appear. A unit sitting a little over a round number is not being rejected by that entire group of buyers, it is not being shown to them, and no amount of better copy reaches somebody who never loaded the page. This is the one case where a modest adjustment changes the audience rather than the argument, and it is worth testing before you consider anything larger.

Finally, the plan to start high and come down later costs more than owners expect. A listing draws its largest audience in the period right after it goes up, because that is when it lands in front of everybody with a saved search. Spend that on a figure nobody was going to pay and the reduction you make later arrives in a much emptier room.

Listed with everyone, worked by nobody

Open listings are the default here, and from an owner’s chair they look like free exposure: more agencies, more buyers, no obvious downside. The economics from the other side of the desk are not that.

An agent holding an open listing is being asked to spend money — a photographer, portal credits, paid placement, hours of their week — on a sale that any of five rival agencies might complete instead. So they do not spend it. They repost whatever pictures they were sent, put the unit up as cheaply as the portal allows, and give their actual working time to the properties they control. Your property ends up present everywhere and promoted nowhere, which is not the same thing as being marketed.

What a buyer sees is worse than nothing at all. Search your own address on the major portals in a private browser window, the way a buyer would, and count what comes back. Owners are regularly startled: the same unit six or seven times, at three or four different prices, with three different sets of photographs, and descriptions that disagree with each other about the floor area and whether it comes furnished.

A buyer resolves that in about two seconds and lands on one of two conclusions — either the owner is desperate, so they will offer accordingly, or something is off about the listing and it is safer to scroll on. Neither is what you were hoping for. Worse, the lowest of those advertised figures is now your ceiling, because it is the one that will be quoted back at you in the negotiation.

There is a quieter effect as well. An agent showing a buyer four apartments in an afternoon will steer them towards the one where the fee is certain. If yours is open and the unit two floors up is a sole agency, you can work out which one gets described as the better buy in the car on the way over.

Consolidating to a single agency is not automatically the answer, and handing an exclusive to the agency that has already let the property sit for months is paying for the same behaviour twice. If you do go sole, go to somebody who can name completions in your own building, on a fixed end date, against a written list of what they will actually do — beginning with new photographs.

Until somebody visits, the photographs are the property

Every viewing now starts as a thumbnail on a phone, in a grid, beside a dozen alternatives. That one image has a single job: to make the next tap happen. Owners assess their own listing on a laptop, one large photo at a time, and never once look at it in the setting where it is actually competing.

So look at it the way it is consumed. Open the search results on a phone, at your price and your area, and find yours among the rest. The failure is usually obvious inside a second, and it is usually one of a short list of the same mistakes.

Shot after dark with the ceiling lights on and the curtains shut, so the windows are black mirrors and the room reads like a corridor in a budget hotel. Shot on a phone at chest height, so a third of the frame is ceiling. Shot on a lens so wide that the living room visibly bends, which costs you the buyer’s trust in the whole set the moment they walk in and find it smaller. The owner’s laundry, shoes, chargers and crowded worktops left in shot. A lead image that is a bathroom, a lift lobby, or the outside of the block photographed at noon from the far side of a car park.

What is missing matters as much as what is there. No floor plan, so nobody can work out how the rooms relate and everyone assumes the worst arrangement. Nothing shot from the balcony, when in a tower the view is frequently the entire reason for the price. Nothing of the pool, the gym or the lobby, which is what a buyer is comparing between buildings rather than between units. No video walkthrough, which is the difference between an overseas buyer shortlisting you and skipping you without a thought.

A proper shoot is a morning’s work. It needs the place cleared of clutter, the air conditioning running well before the photographer arrives so nobody is working in a hot room, blinds open, every bulb in the unit matching in colour temperature, and real daylight through the glass. One instruction is worth insisting on above the rest: nothing in the set that the property cannot live up to when a person is standing in the room. Overselling in pictures does not buy a sale. It buys viewings that end in polite silence — which is precisely the pattern that gets misread as a price problem and answered with a discount.

The buyer this unit needs may not be in Thailand

Plenty of property sells perfectly well to the domestic market. Other property — a sea-view unit in a resort development, a foreign-freehold apartment in a block overseas owners already occupy, an unusually large layout in a project whose buyers were never local — has a buyer pool that mostly lives somewhere else. If yours is in the second group and the marketing is entirely domestic, the listing is not competing badly. It is not in front of its market at all, and no price cut solves that.

Reach is a specific set of things, not an attitude. It means the listing exists in the languages those buyers search in, rather than a Thai description put through a translator and forgotten. It means appearing on the portals they actually use, which are not the portals a Bangkok buyer uses. It means somebody answers an enquiry in the buyer’s language, inside their working day rather than yours, and will take a video call at an hour that is the middle of your night.

It also means the agent can answer an overseas buyer’s opening questions without going away to check. Whether this unit can be transferred to a foreign buyer on a freehold basis. Where the building currently stands on foreign ownership, and whether the juristic person will put that in writing. What evidence of funds the Land Office will expect from somebody bringing money in from abroad. An agent who fumbles those on the first call has already lost you that buyer, who has three other units open in other tabs and no particular attachment to yours.

There is a harder version of this to face. Whether your unit can go to a foreign buyer as freehold at all is governed by the Condominium Act’s cap on how much of a building’s saleable area may be held freehold by foreign owners, and by how much of that the building has already used up. Only the juristic person managing your building can say where it stands today, and the position moves every time another owner sells. If there is none available and your unit sits on the Thai side of the register, the overseas freehold buyer is not your market whatever the apartment is like — and a price set as though they were is the reason the phone is not ringing.

The test here is easy. Ask your agent where the enquiries have come from. If the property needs an international buyer and every enquiry in months has been domestic, you have found your problem, and it is not the price.

The thing about the building you have decided not to hear

This is the least comfortable section and the one that unsticks the most listings. Somewhere in the feedback there is a sentence that keeps coming back, and at some point the owner filed it under excuses instead of under information.

It is different in every building. A tower going up on the plot that currently holds your view, which every buyer’s agent in the area already knows about and you have been telling yourself will not be that bad. A juristic person in open dispute with itself, or one whose arrears are common knowledge because the pool has been shut twice this year. A lift that is out more often than it runs. A low floor looking into the car park. A bedroom with no window. A leasehold whose remaining term is now shorter than a buyer wants to borrow against or resell against. A block that has quietly filled with short-stay guests, so the lobby is a permanent queue of suitcases. A villa on a lane that floods, or one whose access road nobody can show you a registered right of way over.

None of this makes a property unsellable. All of it makes the property worth less than the figure in the owner’s head, and buyers price it instantly and without sentiment, because they are the ones who will be living with it.

The test is simple. If more than a couple of viewers have raised the same point, it is not an objection to be handled by a better answer. It is the market pricing that feature, and there are only three responses available: fix it, disclose it and price for it, or keep the property and wait for the situation to change. Waiting is a perfectly legitimate choice. Waiting while paying for marketing, hoping a buyer turns up who has not noticed, is not a strategy.

Fixing is often cheaper than the discount. Repainting, replacing yellowed air conditioning units, regrouting a bathroom and clearing a decade of belongings out of the second bedroom do not sound like a sales plan, but a tired unit is being marked down against the renovated one on the floor above, and that mark-down is rarely proportionate to what the work would have cost.

A viewing that cannot be arranged is a buyer you never had

The last cause is the least glamorous and by far the most common in tenanted units and absentee-owner properties. Buyers in Thailand often look on a compressed schedule — a long weekend built around it, a relocation with a start date, a trip that has to produce a decision. They see what can be seen while they are here, and they buy from that set. A property that takes several days to arrange is simply not in the set.

The blockages repeat themselves. The tenant does not want strangers walking through their home and is under no obligation to be enthusiastic about it. The only keys are with an owner who is overseas. The juristic person will not let an agent above the lobby without written authority from the registered owner, and nobody has lodged one. Or the owner insists on being present at every viewing, which halves the available slots and quietly costs money as well — buyers do not say what they really think in front of the person selling.

Each of these has a fix that takes a single morning. Leave a set of keys with a named agency and put your written authorisation on file with the juristic person in whatever form they ask for. Agree fixed viewing windows the tenant can plan around, give proper notice in writing, and make it worth their while rather than relying on goodwill — a reduction in rent for the marketing period is cheaper than another few months of carrying an empty sale. If you cannot be reached during Thai office hours, say so, and give the agent written authority to act inside limits you have set, rather than leaving them unable to confirm anything at all without you.

Then check the same thing from the buyer’s end. Send an enquiry on your own listing from an address nobody at the agency recognises, and see how long a reply takes and whether it answers what was asked. Owners run this test and discover that nothing came back at all.

Resetting a stale listing properly

A listing that has been up for months carries a history. The buyers who have already scrolled past it will scroll past it again, and the agents who have shown it will not bring the same clients back for a second look. Quietly lowering the price on the existing advert changes very little, because the audience receiving that news is the one that already declined.

A reset is worth doing once and doing completely. Take the property off the market. Work out which of the causes above genuinely apply — in most stalled sales it is two of them — and deal with those. Have the unit photographed again, properly, after the clutter has gone and the obvious repairs are done. Rewrite the description so it says what the property actually is rather than stacking up adjectives. Gather the paperwork the buyer’s side will ask for in advance, so an offer is not lost to three weeks of waiting on a certificate. Then relaunch at a price supported by completions rather than by the queue of unsold neighbours, through one agency that has committed in writing to what it will do.

Before you renew with the agent you already have, ask them to account for the period that has passed: what they spent and where, which channels the property appeared on, how many enquiries each produced, what the feedback said, and what they now believe the property is worth and why. An agent who has actually been working the listing answers all of that in one sitting. An agent who cannot has been holding your property rather than selling it, and the months behind you are the evidence.