Cambodia vs Thailand Property: What the Nominee Crackdown Means for Foreign Buyers

In June 2026, Thai authorities ran their largest operation yet against nominee-held property, moving on Phuket, Phang Nga and Krabi with dozens of warrants and arrests and flagging land networks worth more than a billion baht. For foreign buyers across the region it quietly changed the question. The comparison between Cambodia and Thailand property used to turn on yield and price. Now it turns on something more basic: does the law actually recognise what you think you own?

What Thailand is enforcing

Thailand reserves land ownership for its citizens, and for years a slice of its resort market grew around a workaround. A local company would be set up with Thai shareholders on paper while a foreign buyer held the real control. It was common enough that many treated it as normal rather than a grey area. In 2026 the state began testing that assumption at scale. Officials have identified tens of thousands of suspected nominee companies, pursued hundreds of prosecutions, and from August introduced a registration rule requiring Thai co-investors to document the source of their own shareholding with three months of bank records. The scrutiny now follows a company across its whole life, not just the moment it is formed.

None of this is unreasonable. A government auditing arrangements that were built to sit outside its own rules is acting within its rights. The useful lesson for a buyer is not the enforcement itself. It is what the enforcement reveals about a position many owners were in without ever realising it.

The structure was the exposure

Picture the typical owner now under review. They paid a fair market price, moved funds through the banking system, and leaned on advisers who assembled a structure that cleared every official counter without objection. Each step felt like compliance because each step came with a form and a stamp. What several of them actually held was an arrangement whose validity rested on a question no registrar had bothered to ask, namely who the company truly belonged to. While that question went unasked the structure worked. Once it is asked in writing, good faith and paid fees do not change the answer.

The damage spreads wider than the files under audit. Thai law still separates a clean lease, a foreign-quota condominium and a nominee villa, and the first two categories are untouched. Markets, though, price feeling rather than legal category. Pictures of raids compress very different holdings into one sense of risk, and buyers who cannot tell the categories apart discount all of them at once.

How Cambodia built a lawful path instead

Cambodia started from the same place, a constitution that reserves land for its citizens, and chose to legislate routes through the restriction rather than leave buyers to improvise around it. Two pathways matter to a foreigner:

• Condominiums. Under the 2010 co-ownership law, a foreigner can buy a unit above the ground floor and hold freehold strata title registered in their own name, with no company and no local shareholder. Foreign ownership can reach up to 70 percent of a building's private floor area, a wider allowance than the 49 percent cap Thailand sets on condominiums.
• Land. The 2019 Law on Trusts lets a licensed, supervised trustee hold legal title while a registered beneficiary, who may be foreign, holds the use, income and succession rights. Every trust is recorded with the Trust Regulator, trust assets are kept apart from the trustee's own, and the tax treatment was clarified by regulation in 2025.

This is not a shadow mechanism. By the middle of 2025 the regulator reported roughly 1,380 registered trusts holding close to two billion dollars in assets, with about two thirds of that in real estate. A foreign beneficiary of a registered trust is not hoping the authorities never look. They have already looked, at registration, and recorded the file.

The clean-title test

The point is not that Thailand has become uninvestable. Its lease and condominium rules remain intact, and a tidier market may well emerge from the process. The point is narrower and more portable. In any country, the gap between what a buyer holds and what the law recognises is a cost that tends to arrive at the worst moment, often to someone who acted honestly throughout. A better test of a market is simple: is the lawful route also the practical one? Where it is not, an industry of workarounds grows to fill the gap. Cambodia's direct strata title and its regulated trust keep the convenient route and the legal route the same, which is exactly the clean-title footing we look for first in the Phnom Penh secondary market.

Ownership structure is the part of a purchase that is easy to skim and expensive to get wrong, so it is worth understanding before you look at a single floor plan. If it would help to talk it through, our advisors are glad to walk you through how strata title and trusts work in practice, with no pressure and no obligation.