How Brixfox Computes Its Thailand Numbers

Prices: Thai Baht, converted, and re-read

Listings are quoted in Thai Baht by the agencies and portals we read. We store the Baht asking price as the source of truth and convert it to US dollars at a live rate for a remote international buyer, so every yield on the page is a USD figure over a USD price. The price is re-read from the listing page on a rolling cycle rather than once at first sight, and a move is recorded as a price change only when the Baht figure moves — the portal's own dollar conversion drifts with the exchange rate and is not a reprice.

These are asking prices. Thailand has no public register of closed sale prices we can use, so treat medians as the top of the negotiating range, and treat a delisting date as the day we detected a listing's removal, not the day it sold.

Expected ADR and occupancy: comps by distance

The nightly rate and occupancy we project come from the Airbnb listings we track around the property's own coordinates — selected by real distance within an adaptive radius, never by district name, and matched on the exact bedroom count. A studio is compared with one-bedroom listings, the nearest real class; a listing with no bedroom count at all is underwritten on its type's most common size and flagged low-confidence rather than silently treated as a two-bedroom.

Occupancy is derived from real availability calendars, tracked daily and diffed to detect bookings, and capped at 75% — a realistic Thai annual maximum. Nightly rates in Thailand are Airbnb asking rates: unlike Bali, where we have enough verified reference homes to measure an asking-to-booked correction, no such factor is applied here yet. A photo-based quality adjustment moves the rate up or down within a stated band, and the reasoning is shown on the page.

Where a property is matched to its own live Airbnb listing, that listing's observed performance is shown alongside the projection.

Net yield: fully managed, after Thai tax, on the all-in cost

The headline number is the after-tax net yield of a fully managed short-term rental, divided by the all-in investment — the asking price plus the acquisition and setup costs a remote buyer actually pays, never the sticker price alone. A self-managed scenario is shown separately as upside: it drops the management commission but prices the owner's time at zero, which is why it is an upper bound rather than the default.

The all-in cost itemises the buyer's customary 1% share of the Land Office transfer fee (freehold condos and company-held villas) or 1% lease registration plus 0.1% stamp duty on a registered leasehold; conveyancing and due diligence at about 1% of price (floored at $1,500 and capped at $8,000); Thai company setup where the structure requires it; a condo juristic-person sinking fund; and turnkey furnishing with short-term-rental launch costs.

Operating costs cover full-service resort management at 28% of gross, channel and payment fees, cleaning net of guest recharges, utilities, condo common-area fees, a 0.7% annual maintenance reserve, insurance, Land & Building Tax, and bookkeeping for a company-held villa. Income tax is a conservative blended 10% of gross for a non-resident owner. Everything is stated before home-country personal tax and before financing.

Ownership: freehold condo, leasehold, or Thai company

Thailand is the one market on Brixfox where tenure is a genuine choice, and the choice changes the numbers. A foreigner can hold a condominium freehold within a building's 49% foreign quota, hold a villa on a registered leasehold, or hold it through a Thai company. Each listing states which, and its acquisition costs, its capital-value assumption and its Ownership Security score follow from it.

On leasehold, Thai law registers a maximum term of 30 years. Longer horizons — the “30+30+30” structure that agencies advertise — rest on contractual renewal options, not a statutory right, so we score a 30-year lease as a 30-year lease and treat longer nominal terms with a modest uplift only. A leasehold whose term the listing does not state is shown as leasehold without a year figure and scored below a known full term; we do not invent one. And because a lease decays toward expiry, we credit leasehold no capital appreciation at all, against a modest annual assumption for freehold.

Have a Thai lawyer verify the renewal mechanics of any lease and the foreign-quota position of any condo before purchase. The structure is the single largest determinant of what you actually own.

The Hotel Act

Under the Thai Hotel Act, letting a property for under 30 days without a hotel licence is technically an offence. In practice most Phuket and Koh Samui stock operates short-term through licensed buildings, branded-residence rental programmes or villa-estate management. Every Thailand listing page carries this warning for the property in question; verify that the building or estate permits daily rental before buying, because the projections assume it does.

Location precision, stated honestly

Thai portals rarely publish exact coordinates. Where a listing could only be placed on its area or neighbourhood centre, the page says so with an “area estimate” badge, the map pin is drawn at that centre, and the projection is flagged lower-confidence — because comps are selected by distance from that pin, and a centroid can be a kilometre from the beach the listing is actually on.

When we show no number

A projection with too little behind it is worse than none. When fewer than five comparable listings are found, when the comp engine's own confidence is too low, or when the implied gross yield is so high that the likelier explanation is a broken price rather than an exceptional property, the financial figures are withheld and the listing is flagged. The other scoring pillars — location, visual appeal, ownership security — stand on their own evidence, so such a listing keeps a lower, real score instead of a hollow one.