What Bangkok Buyers Actually Paid — 18 Answers on Off-Plan and Resale Discounts

Nobody can look up what a Bangkok condo sold for

Thailand has no MLS and no public registry of transaction prices. Every price you can see anywhere — on a developer's site, on a portal, on this one — is an asking price. That is a structural gap, not a gap in anyone's dataset, and it means the single most useful number in the market is the one number nobody publishes.

The obvious workaround is to assume the Land Department holds it, since every transfer is registered and taxed. We argued exactly that in public, and two commenters corrected us with the same detail from opposite sides of a deal: the declared transfer price is routinely written down to the government appraised value to reduce the 2% transfer fee. One said an agent proposed it to them directly; another said their seller simply did it. So what the state holds is substantially appraisals rather than receipts, and treating it as a source of truth for what people paid would be wrong.

That leaves asking someone. Over three days in August 2026 we put the question to two threads and collected eighteen usable answers, spanning purchases from 2014 to the present, off-plan houses and condos, resale units, and one bank foreclosure. What follows is what they said.

"Percent off asking" is close to meaningless until you say which asking price

The two most detailed answers in the harvest are, by coincidence, the same three numbers. One buyer took an off-plan 250 sqm five-bedroom house from a major developer: listed at ฿16M, asking ฿14M by the time they arrived, paid ฿12.5M cash in December for the second-to-last unit. A different buyer, on a resale 188 sqm three-bedroom condo 250 metres from EmQuartier, saw an original ask of ฿16M that had already fallen to ฿14M by their viewing, and settled at ฿12.5M after two offers.

Measured against the asking price in front of them, both are 10.7% negotiators. Measured against the original list price, both are 21.9%. Half the movement had already happened in public before either buyer showed up. Any discount figure that does not name its baseline is noise, and most of the figures quoted in property discussions do not name one.

That two unrelated buyers, one off-plan house and one resale condo, landed on identical figures is a coincidence worth flagging rather than a pattern. The sample is two.

Off-plan: the discount is large, but it starts at the third offer

The received wisdom is that new-build prices barely move. One commenter put the developer discount at "often just 2 or 3%, especially if sold through an agent". Another said new projects in Hua Hin simply will not discount. A third paid the asking price outright on a 2014 development. Taken together that reads like a hard ceiling on the category.

It is not a ceiling on the category. It is a ceiling on a single round of negotiation, and the answers that describe more than one round look completely different.

The clearest of them is a four-round transcript on an off-plan house near Mega Bangna. Listed ฿17.9M, end-of-quarter promotion ฿17M. The buyer offered ฿13.6M and was rejected quickly. They offered ฿14.5M and were rejected. They offered ฿15M, at which point the salesperson went to "talk to big boss" and came back at ฿15.8M. They agreed at ฿15.5M with the seller covering all closing costs — 13.4% off the list price, 8.8% off the promoted one.

A second buyer reported 18% off the listing price on a new house from a listed developer, achieved over three rounds of price revisions, and described the mechanism honestly: "It will be uncomfortable to push back repeatedly but you can get much better price than you think." Set against the ฿16M to ฿12.5M off-plan house above, the honest statement is that off-plan discounts in this market are routinely double digits, and that they are simply not available to a buyer who asks once.

This corrects something we published ourselves two days earlier. Our first pass through the harvest concluded that off-plan discounts were small and resale discounts were large. The off-plan answers that arrived afterwards overturned it, and the earlier version was wrong.

Resale is a different negotiation entirely

On resale the price itself moves, and the spread between what a unit is listed at and what it is worth can be larger than anything a developer will concede. One buyer took a 135 sqm Thong Lor unit in an older building listed at ฿10M as a quick sale, against comparables of ฿12–16M, offered ฿8.5M and paid ฿9M. The 10% they negotiated is the least interesting number in that story.

The same buyer supplied the only paid-versus-asked ratio in the whole harvest: three known transactions in their own Phrom Phong building at roughly ฿85,000/sqm, in a building where listings ask ฿100,000–150,000/sqm. One building, three sales, reported second-hand. Nowhere near publishable as a market rate, and included here because it is the only figure of its kind anyone offered.

The counter-example matters as much. One buyer negotiated nothing at all and said so plainly: the asking price was realistic, so they did not bargain. Another, buying in 2015, got 5% off a listing that was already below market, with the seller covering all transfer and agent fees. A realistic ask is a real thing, and 0% off a fair price beats 20% off an inflated one.

When the price will not move, the extras do

Several answers describe the same substitution: developers hold the advertised price and pay you in kind instead. It keeps the headline price intact for the next buyer and for the project's own valuation, which is precisely why they prefer it.

The off-plan house buyer who paid ฿12.5M also took the first year's common fees and insurance, six air conditioning units, four bathroom built-ins, an electric gate, two CCTV cameras and a ฿180,000 HomePro voucher. The buyer of the 2014 development who "paid asking" turned out, on follow-up, to have been offered a choice: the house as-is at ฿7.8M cash, or ฿8M financed with ฿200,000 put toward upgrades. They took the upgrades. That is not a 0% discount, it is a ฿200,000 discount denominated in kitchen fittings.

One commenter summarised the pattern across both sides of the market: developers "keep the advertised price firm but offer furniture, appliances, transfer fees or common fees instead", while resale owners cut the actual price, especially for a quick sale.

• ✓Ask for the value of the package in baht, not the list of items — vouchers and fittings are quoted at retail, not at what they cost the developer.
• ✓First-year common fees and the sinking fund are real money and are frequently conceded when the price is not.
• ✓Closing costs are negotiable separately: two buyers in this harvest got the seller to cover all of them.
• ✓An extras package leaves the headline price on the record, which matters if you ever want to resell against that comparable.

Where the room comes from, and one unverified claim about commissions

Most of the harvest treats the negotiable gap as the developer's margin. One buyer put it somewhere else entirely, and it is the only answer that names a mechanism rather than a number. Their account: agency commissions in Thailand run 20–22%, so on a property costing 10, roughly 2 is agency commission, 2 is marketing, and 1 is contingency and the developer's bank interest. Their conclusion was that a buyer should be aiming for 25–30% off, taken from a combination of the developer's discount and a rebate of the agent's own commission.

Treat that as a lead rather than a fact. It is one person's experience, the 20–22% commission figure is the load-bearing claim and we have no independent source for it, and it sits well above every other figure in the harvest. Another commenter, separately, put agent commission at 5–15% with more room to negotiate when no agent is involved.

What makes it worth recording anyway is the direction. If a meaningful part of the negotiable gap is an intermediary's commission rather than the developer's margin, then the distance between a listed price and a realised one depends on how the buyer arrived — direct, through an agent, or through an agent willing to rebate. That is not something any dataset of asking prices can express, including ours.

The discounts nobody outside the building ever sees

Two commenters independently described the discounts that never reach the market at all. Early units go to friends, family and suppliers at prices reported as roughly half the eventual public price. Separately, deep cuts go to Thai buyers when a project needs to hold the 51% Thai ownership required by the foreign quota, and a building short of Thai buyers has a strong reason to discount to them specifically.

Neither is visible, neither is verifiable, and neither is available to a foreign retail buyer walking into a sales gallery. They are worth knowing about for one reason only: they set a floor on what the developer can accept without the project's economics breaking, and that floor is a lot further down than the sales gallery implies.

The mirror image also showed up. Two commenters described asking prices that rise while the building physically decays, and a townhouse listed for more than ten years at about ฿1M over market by an owner who was, in their own words, "not really looking to sell, but at 2–3× I would". An asking price in Thailand carries no obligation to be serious.

The one channel with realised prices instead of asking prices

Two commenters arrived independently at the same recommendation, and it is the most useful data lead in the harvest: buy from banks and court auctions rather than listing portals. The Legal Execution Department publishes a forced-sale auction register, and a completed auction has a realised price — the exact thing nothing else in this market publishes.

The fuller version of the method: monitor bank-owned non-performing asset stock from BAM, SAM, KBank, SCB, Krungsri and ttb alongside the Legal Execution Department's court auctions, and for Bangkok prefer bank-owned units over court-auction ones because they are easier to inspect, negotiate and actually complete. One buyer took a downtown five-bedroom penthouse this way: asking ฿46M, opened at ฿37M, paid ฿41M after about a month, with the bank as seller and nothing included. Their final price per sqm came out roughly 35% below comparable lower-floor units in the same building, with a full renovation on top.

We have not visited, verified or scraped that register, and distressed sales are a biased sample of the market that would have to be labelled as such before anyone built a price index on them. It is a lead, recorded openly, not a source we are using yet.

What this means for the prices on this site

BaanScope tracks 417 projects from Thailand's nine largest developers, 252 of which are upcoming or under construction rather than completed. Every price in that dataset is a developer asking price, because that is the only price that exists in public.

The uncomfortable conclusion from this harvest is that the gap between those asking prices and what buyers actually pay is real and routinely runs to double digits — larger than we said two days ago, and only available to buyers who make multiple rejected offers. We would rather write that down than imply our numbers sit closer to transaction reality than they do.

What asking prices are genuinely good for is comparison and movement: which projects cut their prices and when, how a district's per-sqm figures shift over time, and which developers publish a completion date at all. Those are relative measures, and they survive the fact that the absolute number is a starting position rather than a result.

Frequently asked questions

Does buying a condo in Thailand get me residency or a visa?

No. Property ownership and immigration status are separate in Thailand, and a condo grants no visa on its own. The only route where property counts at all is the Long-Term Resident visa's wealthy global citizen category, which requires around USD 500,000 in total assets and can include Thai property as one component rather than as the qualifying reason. Most foreign buyers are already in the country on retirement, business, marriage or LTR visas and are buying because a decade of rent costs more, or for rental yield. If a residency permit is the goal, buying property is not the instrument.

How much can I actually negotiate off an off-plan Bangkok condo?

On the evidence in this article, double digits off the list price is achievable but not on the first ask. A single round of negotiation gets roughly 2–3%. The buyers who reported 13.4%, 18% and 21.9% off list all describe multiple rejected offers, three or four rounds of price revisions, and a willingness to be told no repeatedly. End-of-quarter timing and being one of the last unsold units both help. If the price will not move at all, ask what the developer will add instead and get it valued in baht.

Can I look up what a specific condo actually sold for?

Not reliably. Thailand has no MLS and no published transaction registry. The Land Department registers every transfer, but the declared price is routinely written down to the government appraised value to reduce the 2% transfer fee, so those records are substantially appraisals rather than the price paid. The nearest thing to a realised price in public is a completed forced-sale auction from the Legal Execution Department, which is a distressed and therefore biased sample.

Are 30-year leases a way around the foreign quota?

They are a way to occupy a property that you cannot own freehold, and they are worth less than the sales pitch implies. A Thai lease registers for a maximum of 30 years, and the renewal clauses that promise a second or third term are contractual promises rather than registered rights — nothing compels a future owner to honour one. There is a valuation point on top of that: discounted at 5% real, a baht thirty years out is worth about 23 satang, so a second 30-year term is worth roughly a fifth of the headline even if it does hold. It is almost never priced that way.

Is it better to buy through an agent or direct from the developer?

The harvest does not settle this, and the one detailed claim about it is unverified. One commenter reported that developer discounts are smaller when a sale goes through an agent, and put agent commission at 5–15% with more room to negotiate without one. Another reported commissions of 20–22% and argued that a buyer should target 25–30% off by combining the developer's discount with a rebate of the agent's commission. We have no independent source for the 20–22% figure and are not repeating it as a market rate. What both accounts agree on is that the commission is part of the negotiable amount, and that it is invisible in every published price.