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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well it is one of our series Thailand Tales, reminiscing about older days here in Thailand. One thing I was thinking about the other day was the past incarnation of "Property Holding Companies".

For those who are unaware, especially at one time there was a much more enthusiastic if you will, how do I even put it, it was a seemingly looser notion, looser paradigm regarding "Holding Companies" for Thai property Investors. For those who are unaware, foreign nationals in Thailand are barred from owning real estate in any practical sense. There are some exceptions, most notably a big one is condos but we are not really talking about that here, although you could have a Thai Property Holding Company especially that owns property within what is called a “Thai quota” of a Condominium Juristic Person complex. Leaving that aside, what we are talking about here is a company that is set up to own land. Land is specifically barred; foreigners cannot own land in Thailand and in fact they cannot use just a pretextual or pretensive structure to circumvent that rule. There are circumstances where one of these "Property Holding Companies" especially now can be set up but they really have to be properly maintained in order to meet all requirements under Thai Law and not be seeing purely as just a circumvention of the law. 

Now there was a time, and this was actually before my time here in Thailand, so prior to about 15 years ago when it was much more for lack of a better term lax or at least enforcement was. This is the key point because it is interesting, I will talk to older expats and things, non-lay people, folks that are expats that were around the business community maybe even the legal community, kind of knew a thing or two, they would tell you actually strictly speaking it was an enforcement issue or lack of enforcement issue; it didn't have anything to do with the law. The regulations and the law had have basically remained unchanged essentially. But going back prior to 15 years ago into the turn of the last century, going into the 90s, it was a lot laxer. It was almost pretty loosey-goosey for lack of a better term. Folks were just setting up very pretextual companies, to the point of pretensive companies that were being used to hold Thai property. Now problems arose, most notably a lot of folks just thought okay that is done, I don't have to worry about that anymore. Those folks oftentimes ran into problems with things like audited financial statements which must be filed and they got into trouble trying to hold on to their property because they got in arrears on doing those kind of filings and that can lead to taxes and penalties etc. More to the point, when I was first coming into Thailand again some roughly a little less than 15 years ago, there did become much more active enforcement against these kind of structures and as a result, you really can't look at it, if you read something online from like 20 years ago about how to set something like this up, don't necessarily follow that because today it is a totally different story. Again compliance is key and you make sure everything is in compliance with respect to the law and there may be circumstances where it is just impossible for a foreigner to be involved on a corporate structure that is owning property. Again, it is going to be circumstantially dependent but there may be circumstances where it is just an impossibility in the current times we are in.