26 Bangkok Residential Projects Are Approved to Build and Have Not Started
By Cesar Rodriguez · How we source our data
Before a sales gallery opens, a residential building of any size has to clear an environmental impact assessment. That register is public, and it shows 26 approved Bangkok projects the regulator still records as not started. Some have been waiting since 2021.
The register nobody reads against what is on sale
In Thailand, a residential building above a certain size cannot be built without an environmental impact assessment approved by ONEP, the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning. The filings are public, searchable, and carry the project name, the company that owns it, the district, the approval date and a status field the regulator maintains for whether the building exists yet.
That last field is the interesting one, and it is why this list exists. A filing that is approved and still recorded as not started describes a project that is legally cleared to go up and has not gone up. It is supply that predates the marketing entirely: no launch, no show unit, no price list, sometimes no name anybody would recognise.
What we did
We searched the register by developer company and by project name, read 705 rows, and joined them to our catalogue on exact normalised project names in Thai or English. 117 of the projects we track carry a matching filing. Separately, 42 approved filings matched no project we track at all.
Of those 42, the regulator still records 26 as not started. Both halves of that filter carry weight. Without the approval test the list mixes submitted reports with cleared ones, which are different facts. Without the unbuilt test it fills with towers that were finished in 2021 and are simply outside our coverage, which would make the list a statement about our catalogue rather than about Bangkok's supply.
- ✓705 register rows read
- ✓117 tracked projects matched to a filing
- ✓42 approved filings with no match in our catalogue
- ✓26 of those still recorded by the regulator as not started
Where they are, and how long they have been waiting
The 26 sit across 16 named districts and 15 different companies, so this is not one stalled developer. Watthana has the most with 4, then Bangkok Noi with 3, then Phasi Charoen and Bang Khen with 2 each. Three filings state no district and are reported that way rather than guessed at.
The approval dates run from 2021 to 2026, and the distribution is the part worth reading twice: 2024 alone accounts for 9 of the 26. Eight were approved three years ago or more and the regulator still records nothing built.
An approval that has sat for three years is not necessarily a failure. Land assembly, financing and market timing all move slower than a permit, and a developer holding a cleared site through a soft market is behaving rationally. But it is a useful corrective to the way pipeline numbers usually get quoted. A permit is not a start date.
What this is useful for
For a buyer, the value is in the neighbourhood rather than the project. If you are choosing between two locations and one of them has three cleared filings within a few streets, the quiet plot opposite your balcony has a documented, approved future. That is a different conversation from a rumour about what might get built.
For anyone counting supply, this is the layer that sits before every published pipeline figure. Analysts count launches; the register counts clearances, and the gap between the two is exactly the stock that could arrive without warning.
What it is not
The register records the environmental filing, not the sales product. An approval is not a guarantee anything gets built, and it says nothing about when. Names in the register often differ from the name a project is eventually marketed under, and subsidiaries file under their own company names, so the absence of a filing is not evidence that a project lacks one.
Coverage is the honest limit here. Our search is anchored on the developers we track and on names we could match, so this is a floor for how much approved unbuilt supply exists, never a ceiling. A district with no row has no approved unbuilt filing that we found, which is not the same as none existing.
The data is downloadable
The district table is published as the eia-pipeline dataset on our open data page, as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0. Each row carries the district, the number of filings, the number of distinct companies behind them, and the earliest and latest approval years, so the age of a district's backlog is readable without opening a single filing. The source is ONEP's own register, linked from the dataset.
Frequently asked questions
- What is an EIA in Thai property?
- An environmental impact assessment. Residential buildings above a certain size must have one approved by ONEP before construction. The filings are a public register carrying the project, the owning company, the district and the approval date.
- Does an approved EIA mean the project will be built?
- No. It means the project is cleared to build. The regulator maintains a separate status for whether construction has started, and 26 Bangkok-area filings are approved with that status still showing not started.
- How old are these approvals?
- They run from 2021 to 2026, with 9 of the 26 approved in 2024. Eight have been approved for three years or more with nothing recorded as built.
- Which districts have the most approved but unbuilt filings?
- Of the ones we matched, Watthana with 4, Bangkok Noi with 3, then Phasi Charoen and Bang Khen with 2 each. The 26 spread across 16 named districts and 15 companies.
- Is this the full picture of Bangkok's unbuilt approved supply?
- No, it is a floor. The search is anchored on the developers we track and on names we could match, so there will be approved unbuilt filings it does not reach.