Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Property Title searches here in Thailand. Yeah this will come up from time to time when we have folks doing due diligence but in a more broader context it sometimes comes up especially in the context of possible probate as well as divorce proceedings. In my opinion there are two ways to look at Property Title searches in Thailand. There is the, you have the property documentation, you are just verifying everything so you know exactly what that documentation looks like, and then there is "okay I want to take a person's name and find out everything I can about their property in Thailand". 

In the first instance, yeah it is pretty common place. We do due diligence like that all the time. We get their relevant property documentation and we run a search on it and make sure that it is all matches up in the local Land Office database. If it does then generally we proceed usually with the conveyancing, again depending on the circumstances it may be a long-term lease, something of that nature but we go ahead and proceed with whatever we are talking about with respect to the property transaction. 

In the case of things like divorces and probate matters where basically somebody basically wants to take a person's name and find out all of their real estate holdings, yeah there are a lot of Thai laws against that; a lot of privacy laws in Thailand with respect to using a person's name to find out all of their real estate holdings. Thais take the Privacy regarding their real estate holdings very seriously. This is reflected from a policy standpoint in Thai Law and it is not going to be something that is going to be readily available to just take someone's name and then go to the Land Office. In fact if you do that the Land Office might get a little perturbed with you and say you are not supposed to be doing this where you just take someone's name and try to find whether or not they own any property. 

Yeah there are a lot of restrictions associated with doing that in Thailand. Anyone that says they have any “back door” connection or something like that you should view that with a great deal of caution and just be aware that there are a lot of privacy laws here in the Kingdom of Thailand.