On 16 September 2026 the Russian-language Phuket channel «Отдел аналитики Пхукета», hosted by Boris Polyakov, published a two-hour interview with Alexander Davydovsky, a Phuket developer who has been building on the island for more than ten years and living there for more than seventeen. Most of the conversation is about how leasehold gets registered and where the market goes next. The part that changes a number in a seller’s spreadsheet is the tax.
Davydovsky’s point is simple. Everyone on Phuket, he says, assumes withholding tax on a property sale is 1%. That 1% is the rate for a juristic-person seller — a company. An individual selling a property they have held is taxed on a different formula entirely, one he says has been in place for roughly fifty years and that even tax specialists lecturing on the island do not mention. He says nobody he has dealt with over many years there has ever asked him about it; the question always arrives already assuming the flat 1%.
How the individual rate is actually built
The formula Davydovsky describes runs through the Land Office. It takes the appraised value, subtracts a statutory cost-deduction percentage that falls as the years held rise, divides what is left by the years held, runs that annualised figure through the progressive personal income tax brackets, and multiplies the result back by the years held. Nothing in it is a flat percentage, and the effective rate moves with both the size of the property and how long it was owned.
Run on the statutory deduction table and the personal income tax brackets — both set out in our guide to withholding tax on a Thai property sale — three cases the interview raises come out like this. A property appraised at 6,000,000 THB held five years, at a 65% deduction, carries about 97,500 THB, or roughly 1.6% of appraised value. A building portion appraised at 17,000,000 THB held four years, at 71%, comes to about 692,500 THB, or 4.1%. A 25,000,000 THB property held eight years, at a 50% deduction, reaches about 2,045,000 THB — 8.2%. Davydovsky’s own spoken approximations in the interview land close to each of these.
The direction is not the one most sellers assume, and it is not a straight line. The share climbs with the size of the property, but it climbs with the years held only as far as the eighth year — the point where the statutory deduction stops falling and settles at 50%. Past that the deemed gain is spread across more years, drops through the lower brackets, and the effective rate falls away again: the same 25,000,000 THB property that costs 8.2% at eight years costs about 3.7% at twenty. The expensive case is a large property sold around the eight-year mark, and a seller who has pencilled in 1% there has under-budgeted by several percent of the whole price.
Two structures sit outside this. Where a developer transfers a leasehold condo to a company as a freehold, the rate is the 1% everyone quotes, because the seller is a juristic person. And a leasehold resale, Davydovsky says, avoids both this tax and the specific business tax — which he gives as one practical reason buyers choose leasehold in the first place. On villas the split matters too: he describes a sale where the building is about 40% of the price, land being the larger share and only the building held freehold, so the withholding tax falls on the building portion alone. His expectation is that this tax will slow the resale market.
Leasehold, and what the registered contract does not say
Leasehold is the dominant structure in Davydovsky’s own projects — roughly 80% leasehold to 20% freehold, varying by project. Section 540 of Thailand’s Civil and Commercial Code caps a lease of immovable property, land or a unit, at 30 years, and allows a new lease of up to 30 years after the first term expires. It does not guarantee that renewal. A leaseholder ends up holding two instruments, the chanote and the registered lease contract, and appears on the chanote as lessee rather than owner. A freeholder holds one.
What has moved repeatedly is how the renewals get registered. Before 2014, Davydovsky says, Phuket Land Office contracts routinely carried 30+30+30 inside the registered contract. In 2014 a new department head ordered that only the first 30 years be registered, with the renewals moved into a separate civil contract. Around 2017 the three-term form came back. Around 2020, during Covid, it went back to 30 only. Then a Supreme Court decision, widely reported in 2025, held one same-day, prepaid 30+30+30 arrangement void because it was designed to evade the 30-year cap. It voided that package, not every promise of a future term. Contracts registered before 2014 with 90 years in them are still sitting in the Land Office. He also notes that each provincial land office interprets central rules locally — the head of the office, sometimes the officer at the desk, sets the practice — so the same registration can be accepted in one province and refused in another.
That leaves the unregistered civil contract carrying the weight at the 30-year mark, and specifically its wording on what the developer owes if it refuses to renew. Many contracts now say the developer must return the money, sometimes indexed for inflation, under any non-renewal including a change in the law. The failure Davydovsky points to is in the pricing: many contracts put the whole sum in the first term and price the second and third at 1,000 baht each, so a promise to return the money returns 1,000 baht. He argues for splitting the price evenly across the three terms, says agents should read that clause before registration, and says that where a developer will not negotiate it, he would steer the client to freehold instead. Some developers, he adds, are hard to move on contract terms at all.
Buildings sit under separate rules. Davydovsky says Thai law lets a foreigner own a building freehold on land held under a lease, registered separately and evidenced by its own Land Office document, so a villa sale splits into two contracts — one for the building, one for the land. That separation is not automatic. It takes a registered superficies, and without one the house follows the land under default Thai rules, as our guide to freehold and leasehold in Thailand sets out. Davydovsky says the law is silent on what happens to the building once every lease term ends: it does not require the leaseholder to demolish it, nor the landowner to buy it, leaving the question to the courts, where in his experience the judge sends both sides into a room to settle. For owners whose villa sits in a Thai company and who now want to move to leasehold, he says his own company would take them back, and that cancelling the original transaction at the Land Office is cheaper than a resale, which triggers transfer taxes. He says he knows of other developers refusing such requests and can only guess at their reasons. How company ownership works in practice is covered in our guide to owning Thai property through a company.
Why he thinks the resale market’s moment has arrived
The supply argument behind that is about permits. Phuket once rationed developer approvals to a fixed number of units per year, Davydovsky says, which held supply short and prices rising; in 2022 that gate opened and permits started issuing fast, and he received one in about three months where the wait had been a year or more. The gate is now closing again, he says, but through norms rather than unit caps: a zoning revision and a lower units-per-rai coefficient, so four rai that once took about 300 units now takes about 150. He expects that to push new-build toward larger units, lower buildings, villas and luxury.
The consequence he draws is the one that matters to a buyer. If the primary market only offers luxury, the mass-market buyer with 3–4 million baht has nowhere to go in new-build — a developer studio now starts around 6 million — so that buyer goes to resale. He divides buyers into hot heads, on holiday with 3–4 million baht and willing to take a risk, and cold heads, who calculate; resale buyers, in his reading, will be cold heads. Roughly a thousand agencies operate on the island, he says, and they are currently short of clients, yet agents keep selling new-build because the process is familiar: a resale needs a contract, an escrow account, correct fund transfer and registration, plus getting into a tenanted unit to show it.
On the stock already going up, he does not think it is dead money. It will sell, he says, but not at the prices some owners expected. Projects built with hotel service operations and back-of-house space will fill; those that are not hotel-run and are already 15–20 years old struggle, and that stock ends up on resale, likely below purchase price. Polyakov, the host, said his own research earlier this year found half of all residential stock under construction on Phuket sits in greater Bang Tao — Surin, Bang Tao and Layan — out of a total he put at 23,000–25,000 condo units under construction island-wide, and that a 500-metre radius around one Bang Tao landmark contains, counting announced projects to 2030, around twenty condominiums and 4,500 units. Stock under construction across greater Bang Tao is a different measure from new condo launches by district in a single year, which is why our 2026–2030 outlook can show Bang Tao at a small share of 2025 launches while much of the stock now in build sits there. Davydovsky expects Bang Tao will not keep absorbing investment at that rate and that investors will move on: he names the south, particularly Rawai and Nai Harn, as underpriced, smaller in volume than Bang Tao but better on profitability, and says Kamala may be good. He does not expect the north of the island to develop as fast as some expect.
He also expects townhouses back. Phuket built many around 2008–2011, he says, then stopped because condos paid better; the buyer with about 20 million baht who wants a residence with a pool but cannot reach a villa has no obvious product, and in Bang Tao a villa as a residence now means finding about a million dollars. He is bringing six townhouses to market, he says, within a week of the interview. On build quality he blames the contractor pool — a mass market that pulled in inexperienced labour — and says hiring an inspector does not fix it; his own answer was to build an in-house construction arm, while larger Bangkok developers bring their own crews from other regions.
Licensing is the other structural constraint he raises. No condominium anywhere in Thailand holds a hotel licence and none can obtain one, he says, while condos let short-term regardless; on Phuket around 40% of hotels lack a hotel licence, and in some areas 90%. The working arrangement he describes is a neighbouring licensed hotel operating a condo through a single reception.
Davydovsky also characterises the recent short-term-let inspections, the checks on Thai companies with the 49/51 foreign-Thai shareholder split, and the closure of dormant foreign-held bank accounts as, respectively, political publicity ahead of an election, list-driven checks aimed at votes rather than at destroying foreign business, and banks acting on their own internal risk statistics rather than under government instruction. Those are his readings of the motives of Thai authorities and banks, not established facts; nothing on the record establishes why any of it was done. He adds that the department actually regulating short-term letting is the Land Office, through an office for protecting residents’ rights that acts on resident complaints, and that a court, not an inspection, is what can rule an ownership structure unlawful.
What is not settled
Everything above is what two named speakers said on a dated recording. No published record confirms the tax mechanics, the registration history, the density and permit figures, the licensing shares or the supply counts independently of them. Polyakov’s Bang Tao numbers come from his own research as described on air; the underlying dataset is not published. Davydovsky is also an interested party, not just an unverified one: leasehold is the dominant structure in his own projects, his firm would handle the company-to-leasehold conversions he recommends, and he is launching townhouses into the segment he describes as having no product. His reading of the market and his commercial position run in the same direction. Davydovsky says outright that he has no hard statistic for the shift he sees toward buyers who come to Phuket to live rather than to rent out or visit — only that far more of his clients now say it.
His ten-year read is that the market is maturing: 2023, 2024 and 2025 were an exceptional boom that will not repeat, and the island is back to a steady rhythm like the pre-Covid years, with a high and a low season and growth continuing without the swings. He invests only in what he builds, plus land — no securities, no funds.
For a seller, the practical takeaway is narrower and checkable. Before setting a resale price, work the withholding tax out on the statutory table for the years actually held, not on the 1% figure the market repeats.
