Phuket Developers Turn to LTR Visas and Registered Use Rights as Nominee Scrutiny Tightens

As Thai authorities step up enforcement against nominee shareholding arrangements used to get around foreign land-ownership limits, Phuket developers are pitching two legal alternatives to prospective foreign buyers: the Long-Term Resident (LTR) visa, which can grant qualifying applicants stays of up to ten years, and registered property-use rights, a structure that grants a foreigner the right to use a property for up to 30 years without transferring freehold title to the underlying land. Neither tool is new, but reporting from Nation Thailand indicates developers are promoting both more actively now that weaker foreign demand has coincided with tighter scrutiny of how villa deals get structured.

Chinese buyers in particular are said to be responding well to registered use rights, reportedly because the arrangement comes with a clearer legal paper trail than a nominee company does. The structure has so far found more traction in Chiang Mai and Pattaya than in Phuket, according to the reporting, though adoption on the island is expected to grow as both developers and buyers become more familiar with how it works. That lag suggests Phuket’s villa market, long built around straightforward (if legally murky) nominee setups, is still adjusting to a landscape where that approach carries real enforcement risk.

The shift comes against the backdrop of a broader nominee crackdown that has already produced raids elsewhere in the country, including the widely reported Hua Hin villa-estate case, and reflects a island market where pool villas — rather than condos, which foreigners can already own outright under the Condominium Act — have borne the brunt of the tightened scrutiny. For developers, offering a buyer a defensible legal path to long-term use of a property, rather than a workaround that could later unravel, is becoming as much a selling point as the villa itself.

Whether these alternatives meaningfully offset Phuket’s slowing foreign villa demand remains to be seen, but their growing visibility in developer marketing is itself a sign of how much the compliance conversation around foreign property buying in Thailand has shifted over the past year.