In 2025, foreigners took ownership of 14,899 condominium units in Thailand. That is up 2.2% on the year before. Sounds healthy. Then look at the money: total transfer value fell 10.7% to 60.92 billion baht. More buyers. Smaller cheques.
Q1 2026 sharpened it further. Foreign transfers fell 17.3% by unit and 17.9% by value. But the decline was not evenly spread, and that is the part most developers and hotel groups have not adjusted for.
The buyer mix flipped. Most marketing did not.
Chinese purchases dropped 38.8% in a single quarter. For six straight years China was the number one source of foreign condo buyers in Thailand. It still leads on volume, but it is shrinking fast, and value is falling faster than units.
Meanwhile, in the same quarter:
- Russia +33% by units, and +69% by value
- India +40%
- Australia +36.1%
Russians are now the second largest foreign buyer group in Thailand by both volume and value, overtaking Myanmar. And note the gap between those two Russian numbers: value climbing twice as fast as units means they are not buying more, they are buying better. Concentrated in the tourism markets. Phuket and Pattaya.
If your media plan still assumes a Chinese buyer, you are spending against the one segment that is contracting.
Stop marketing to "foreigners"
One English landing page, one Meta campaign, one Google search budget. That is not an international strategy. That is a strategy for the buyer you had in 2019.
Foreign buyers are not one audience. They do not share a language, a search engine, a messaging app, or a reason for buying. Treating them as a single funnel is why cost per qualified lead keeps climbing while conversion does not.
Russia: you cannot reach them on Google
This is the single most expensive blind spot in Thai property marketing right now.
Russian speakers do not search on Google. They search on Yandex, which serves more than 80 million users a month. VK carries around 60 million monthly actives. And Telegram hosts over 500 specialised communities for property investors and Russians living in or moving to Thailand.
Three channels, effectively zero competition from developers still buying Google keywords in English. What that looks like in practice:
- A Russian-language landing page. Not a translated one. Written for the market, with payment flow explained.
- Yandex Direct capturing search demand that already exists.
- Presence in the Telegram communities where these buyers already ask each other questions.
- Enquiries routed to Telegram, not a web form nobody fills in.
China: still the biggest, still shrinking
Chinese nationals took 4,940 units in 2025. Still the largest single group. But units fell 12.9% and value fell 30%, which tells you the same buyer is trading down.
The move is not to abandon China. It is to stop over-indexing on it. Rebalance the budget toward the markets that are growing, and adjust the Chinese offer toward the price band they are actually transacting in.
India and Australia: the fastest growth and the cheapest to reach
India up 40%. Australia up 36.1%. Both English-speaking. Both reachable on the channels you are already running.
This is the easiest incremental win available to a Thai developer or hotel group right now. You do not need a new platform, a new language, or a new agency stack. You need targeting, creative and a payment explainer built for those two markets specifically. For Indian buyers in particular, route to WhatsApp. It is where the conversation will happen whether you plan for it or not.
The objection that quietly kills deals
Every foreign buyer has the same two questions before price ever comes up. Can I actually own this? And how do I pay for it?
Almost nobody markets around this. Which is exactly why it converts.
Under Section 19 of the Condominium Act, foreign ownership in any project is capped at 49% of saleable floor area. Not unit count. Floor area, with common areas, parking and lobbies excluded from the calculation. When a building reaches that cap, new foreign freehold registration is blocked until a foreign-held unit returns to Thai ownership. The usual fallback is leasehold, typically 30 years with renewal terms.
Then there is the money. Freehold registration requires an FET form, and a Thai bank will only issue one if the funds arrived from abroad, in foreign currency, referencing the purpose of the transfer. Get that wrong and the registration does not happen.
Worth stating plainly to buyers: verbal assurance from a sales agent carries no legal weight on quota. Buyers should verify with the developer in writing, the Land Office, or their own Thai property lawyer.
The marketing play: publish live quota status per building, and a plain explainer of the payment flow. It removes the two biggest objections before a salesperson ever picks up the phone, and it is content your competitors are not producing. This is information, not legal advice, and your content should say so.
Hotels: same shift, same fix
The nationality mix that moved property moved travel with it. If your direct booking channel is English-only while your arrivals are increasingly Russian and Indian, your OTAs will keep converting the guests you could have taken direct.
A Russian-language booking path, Yandex visibility and Telegram as a reservations channel do the same job for a hotel that they do for a developer. Pair it with the direct booking playbook in reducing OTA dependence, and you are attacking commission and audience at the same time.
What to do this quarter
- Pull your own enquiry and transfer data by nationality. Not the market average. Yours.
- Build one properly localised landing page for each of your top three markets. Language, currency, payment flow.
- Add Yandex Direct and Telegram for Russian demand.
- Scale Google and Meta against India and Australia while acquisition there is still cheap.
- Publish your quota position and an FET explainer.
- Route every enquiry to the messenger that market actually uses. Telegram for Russia. WhatsApp for India. WeChat for China.
The market did not get smaller. It got redistributed. The developers and hotels that re-point their targeting in the next two quarters will buy attention at a discount that will not last.
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