Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing who actually owns the property. You will hear the term due diligence thrown around a lot with regard to lawyers. It seems to me one of those things, they just say the way say let's say "port and starboard", it's just kind of one of these terms of art that is bandied about a lot in the legal community.

The question posed by this video or maybe the answer to the question posed by this video what is due diligence in a property context? Well effectively it's ascertaining whether or not that person actually owns the property. We also assist with conveyancing meaning we assist in actually transferring land title from one person or one entity to another. What due diligence really comes down to is this property as advertised. Can this person sell it? Do they have the rights to it etc.? Now that seems pretty straightforward. We deal with a lot of foreigners that come here and just presume that the property market, the real estate market, condos all of that good stuff works similarly to how it works in their part of the world. But the fact of the matter is we saw one of these this past week, what I sometimes call "telephone booth Indian" which is based on a book by the same title Telephone Booth Indians which this was a practice in depression era of the United states, in New York especially where men would go out and they would take these signs and put them up on a vacant buildings that would say ‘for sale’, ‘for rent’ or ‘for lease’, and then they would put a phone number on it and then what they would do is the phone number was actually the number to a telephone booth somewhere and they would go camp out in the telephone booth, that is why they were called the "telephone booth Indians" in the parlance of that time because they were camping out in a telephone booth to wait for calls regarding this property and then they would work up a deal to get paid on it and this person would think that they owned it and they didn't. This was a really common con during, sort of confidence game during the Great Depression.

Well unfortunately we sometimes see this happen here in Thailand. People will advertise things or get somebody on the book to buy something or more often it is not quite as brazen as they don't own the property at all, it is oftentimes a situation where people will say you can get a right to a piece of property that may not be possible, for example some kind of lease that may not be possible, or for example they may sort of gloss over needing to do relevant formalities associated with title registration even in the event of a lease or usufruct -  that is a right of use sometimes referred to as a superficies is the right to use service of the land, again these kinds of things do come up and this is the reason that due diligence is so important. You want to have legal professional go in there, figure out what is actually the case with the given property and basically go from there.