Buying off-plan or completed: the timing, the risk, the contract

How does paying for off-plan differ from paying for a completed unit?

One payment event, against several years of them. Buying completed is one payment event. You reserve, you sign, you remit the funds from abroad, and within a few weeks you meet at the Land Department, pay the balance and receive a title deed with your name on it. The capital is committed for weeks, and from the day of transfer the asset exists in a form you can inspect, let or sell.

Buying off-plan spreads the same money across years. A booking fee reserves the unit; a contract payment follows within a set period; instalments run through construction; and the largest tranche falls due at transfer, which is also the first moment anything is registered in your name. Until then you hold a contractual right against a company, not a property right against the world.

Three of our 23 developments publish their payment terms on the price sheet itself, and we transcribe them verbatim rather than summarising them: one takes ฿100,000 at booking, 30% of the price on contract thirty days later and the balance at transfer; one takes ฿5,000 at booking and ฿25,000 on contract thirty days later, ฿30,000 of instalments in total, deducted from the balance due at transfer; one states a booking fee of ฿5,000 per unit. The remaining twenty quote their terms at reservation. The difference between those first two structures is the difference between a third of the price standing at risk for years and a few tens of thousands of baht.

For a foreign buyer there is a second timing consequence that has nothing to do with the developer. Your purchase money must arrive from abroad in foreign currency and be documented for the Land Department, and the exchange rate that matters is the one on the day each tranche lands — not the one you saw when you signed. An off-plan purchase converts your currency over several years. That is not a risk anybody can quantify for you in advance, and no calculator on this site pretends to.

What can go wrong before an off-plan building is handed over?

Delay, which is ordinary, and non-delivery, which is not. Delay is the ordinary case, and the standard contract addresses it. Non-delivery is the serious case: a building that stops, a company that cannot finish, a specification that arrives materially different from the one sold. Sales galleries in Thailand are frequently better than the building that follows, which is precisely why the law makes the advertising part of the contract.

Completion dates in public listings are expectations, and we keep the distinction visible in our own data rather than flattening it. Of our 23 developments, twenty are recorded as completed, two carry an expected date and one is under construction with a stated Q4 2027 completion. An expected date is a date from public sources, not a building we have verified as finished, and any figure computed against such a project inherits that uncertainty.

What protections does an off-plan buyer actually have?

Three, and all three are statutory. The Condominium Act B.E. 2522 (1979), as amended by the Condominium Act (No. 4) B.E. 2551 (2008), gives an off-plan condominium buyer three real protections. Section 6/2 requires the sale and purchase agreement to follow the standard form prescribed by the Minister, and any term that departs from it to the buyer's disadvantage is void — so the contract you are handed is not the developer's own drafting on the points that matter. Section 6/1 makes the developer's advertising material part of the agreement and requires the developer to keep it, which is why you should keep your own copy of every brochure, floor plate and specification sheet you were shown.

Third, a unit cannot be transferred to you until the completed building is registered as a condominium and unit title deeds are issued. That registration is what converts your contract into ownership, and it is the point at which the foreign quota is measured — so a purchase agreed today is transferred against the quota position years from now.

Beyond the Act, the Escrow Act B.E. 2551 (2008) permits purchase money to be held by a licensed escrow agent and released against milestones. It is voluntary, and in the Thai market it is uncommon. It is still worth asking for, and the answer you get is itself information.

• Check the sale and purchase agreement is on the prescribed standard form
• Keep every brochure and specification — advertising forms part of the contract
• Get the delay and default remedies in writing, and read what they actually pay
• Make the deposit refundable if the foreign quota is unavailable at transfer
• Ask whether escrow is available, and note the answer
• Ask what is fixed and what the developer may vary in the specification
• Confirm who pays which transfer-day charge, in the contract, not in conversation

What does buying a completed unit give you instead?

Evidence. A finished building can be inspected, and so can its finances. The juristic person's accounts, the sinking fund balance, the minutes of the last annual general meeting and the debt-free letter tell you how the building has actually been run — evidence that does not exist for a building that has not opened. You can see the real view from the real floor, and you can let the unit from the month you take the keys.

The trade-offs are the mirror image. There is no staged payment plan to spread the cost, the unit is what it is rather than what you specify, and in an older building the assessments that fund façade work or lift replacement are a real and near-term liability rather than a distant one.

One point applies to every residence on this site regardless of which route you take: all of our stock is developer stock, so the seller is a company. That changes the tax mix at transfer — corporate withholding of 1% rather than the individual's years-held computation — and it means the transfer-day promotions are the developer's, published on the sheet and printed on our listings in the developer's own words, carve-outs included.