ladybiker wrote:We bought a house in Hua Hin 4 years ago via the company route, do any of you have any experience of changing from company owned land to leasehold land.
Do you know if the Thai has to prove they can afford to buy the land?
Yes done it a few times, it was completely straight forward no hassles/questioning etc due to it being a Limited Company, and there was no questioning of the new buyer about proof of funds, the land office just require you to pay the taxes on the sale amount and lease registration.
It's about the individuals comfort level at the risks associated with nominee shareholder set-up versus whether they consider 30 years long enough. If you do transfer the land to a Thai national be sure to register the house in your personal name at the same time, if it's not done already.
Personally I've got my house under my Limited Company and am not interested in changing that
until a government in the future says we have to, although the advice from lawyers now for new buyers is don't start up a company but use leasse/Usufruct. Then I'd probably channge to a Usufruct rather than lease as you get the rights to stay there for the rest of your lifetime, but this is dependant upon personal circumstances, and as you said "we" I'm not sure about a Usufruct for two names!?!?
The last time there was a proposed (it was dropped before it got approved) new act tightening up on foreign/nominee shareholding for companies carrying out business under list 1 & 2 of the FBA (ie: did not include list 3 which our companies should be set-up under) it proposed that you had a period of 12 months to re-structure your shareholding. You can register a lease in 12 hours. There was plenty of advance warning too, the drafts were talked about in public and would have taken something like 6 months to get approved through the various government assembly voting stages.
I suppose an overnight emergency act could come into force and we wake up with the army knocking on our doors to kick us out
SJ
