Thursday, June 25, 2015

Foreigners and Landed Property in Thailand

Primitive Department
There are just no friggin benefits on many terms when we foreigners purchase a house in Thailand. It’s just friggin unfair that we are spending our money in here genuinely for a living and yet having no whatsoever decent returns. Do you know that as Thais, they get significant tax reductions annually where we have to pay full terms without any reductions? I have not seen the environment improve while many of us paid heavy income taxes. Traffic only got worse for sure with the “My First Car” entitlement, the general public which had their purchases happily subsidized with our money.

Come on Thailand, even when we have a decent job and a proper house to stay in, the official residential address for us is the office (work permit address = residential address = WTF?). Who eats, shits and sleeps in the office for crying out loud! We can’t even get our names into that mysterious household blue book of yours. (Having a name registered in there is a prerequisite for some other financial related businesses).

The question…. so how do we buy a house you wonder? We have to buy in our spouse’s name (mandatory to be opposite sex I guess, and cannot be animal). And we are made to sit and wait in the ridiculously chaotic land department office that you have never thought of improving for decades. The legroom between the rows of chairs was less spacious then that I had on AirAsia. And during the signing procedure, all documents were in Thai. The only word said to me by the staff was “You sign this document you know house and property is belong your wife. You pay. You no to own the house, everything belong wife”.