Transcript of the above video:

Foreign work authorization has unfortunately been a major issue on the lips of many the past week or so or at least those sort of in the periphery to this channel. I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on one of our prior videos and it was a comment when we were talking about a recent raid on a firm down in Phuket that involved nominee companies and also companies that were engaging in restricted occupations in Thailand. 

So quoting directly from that comment: "Wait a moment, I've encountered many, many non-Thai real estate agents. Are you saying foreigners can't be real estate sales agents? Does this applies to Americans as well under comedy?” (I think they meant Amity, the US- Amity Treaty) So I wrote back, actually a comment there and I am just going to quote it and then I will go into a little further. "They are operating illegally. All brokerage and agency work occurring domestically in Thailand is prohibited under Section 19 of List 1 of the Prohibited Occupations Decree. I will go ahead and put a link to that, well we will go ahead and put it up here on this video to show you the Decree. I have quoted from it previously but again, List 1, and that is section 19 of the Prohibited Occupations Decree. Quoting further: "Matters pertaining to real estate are also specifically precluded under the terms of the US-Thai Treaty of Amity". So again, as we have discussed in prior videos, yeah anything having to do with land, land trading, land ownership; again brokerage, agency; brokerage and agency is specifically mentioned in the Restricted Occupations Decree which was promulgated in 2020 so it's not like this is some archaic thing that nobody's aware of. No, this has always been out there and yes anything having to do with real estate, foreigners have always been precluded from operating in that space. I thought that was pretty well known but yet again as we have discussed, this can be a big misnomer and it can be especially sort of well misleading quite frankly for many foreigners here in Thailand. What I mean to say is there a lot of people that come in to Thailand and think they are dealing with somebody and quite honestly they really are not qualified to be doing that and real estate is a perfect example of this. That is something that is restricted to the Thais and the Thais only. 

Now I'm sure I am going to get burned in the comments for all of this stuff and that's to one degree or another okay, but at the end of the day yes the term ‘protectionism’ is not inappropriate when talking about these kinds of rules and regulations but at the end of the day, that is what Thailand is trying to do. They are trying to protect their domestic labour force and they are trying to protect these sort of White Collar administrative jobs if you want to call them that, sort of White Collar middle class jobs if you want to call them that; they are intentionally trying to protect that and that's what's going on here and the law is pretty clear on that fact. So for those who are interested in that, I'll put a link in the description below to the actual Decree itself but we'll go ahead and throw it up here so people can see it and yeah that is basically what you are dealing with. Again, I know that this may cause some folks some consternation but this hasn't been an unknown quantity; as you can see on the Department of Employment website, the Thai Department of Employment website that we are citing here, that's the English language version. This is not again out there; it's in the public sphere. I always kind of get a little peeved at the expression 'ignorance of the law is no defense’ but that is true. At the end of the day, if you are going to come some place and live and you are not going to look up what you have an ability to do, it's kind of on you if it turns out that what you are doing is illegal and you just never were aware of it. So that's kind of where things stand on that and if anything changes with this respect to that, we will certainly keep people updated on this channel as the situation evolves.