Land price of special economic zones soared 100%.
Thailand’s push to build a parcel-level property tax system has forced a closer look at how commercial land is actually used across the country’s provinces. For years, provincial offices relied on zone-level averages that grouped residential blocks, agricultural plots, and commercial compounds under the same broad assessment. As the draft Land and Building Tax Act moves forward, that approach has proven too blunt for the variety of economic activity now spread across secondary cities and border corridors.
In eastern and southern border provinces, commercial land increasingly supports businesses tied to cross-border services, including firms operating in the offshore sports betting market that has expanded across Southeast Asia over the past decade. Accurately valuing those parcels requires income-based metrics that the current zone-average framework was never designed to produce, which is part of what the new memorandum between the Treasury Department and the Department of Land is meant to address.
Mr. Naris Chaiyasoot, Director-General of the Treasury Department, revealed that he has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Land to set up a land valuation appraisal account in 2015. It aims to expand the land valuation areas by piece of land basis covering across the country in response to the draft Land and Building Tax Act. The Treasury Department will share information with the Department of Land on map data, land registration, condominium information, including land trading information. Then, these information will be analyzed to determine the valuation before making a valuation appraisal account for sending to the Department of Land to further use to register the rights and juristic act.
The data-sharing arrangement is expected to give both departments a clearer picture of transaction-level pricing across regions. By cross-referencing cadastral maps with registration records and actual sale prices, appraisers can move closer to market-based valuations rather than relying on uniform zonal figures that have lagged behind real trading conditions in higher-growth areas.
Provincial land offices will still need staff training and upgraded technical systems before parcel-level assessments can roll out at national scale. Pilot programs in provinces with the highest transaction volumes are expected to precede a broader implementation, allowing the two departments to refine their shared data pipelines and resolve discrepancies between appraisal benchmarks and registration records before the act takes full effect.
