Page 108 - _21-0619 OK

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XII, 2020

To construct a reliable estimate of the value of land in a city and its
surrounding area, it would be necessary to make a calculation plot by plot with
a detailed map showing the estimated price in each locality and, more especially,

one that delineates zones of high and very high prices with some precision.
The primary source of detailed information on land prices in all parts of

the country is listings of reference prices published by the Treasury Department
for use in determination of taxes and fees when property transactions are
registered at the Department of Lands. It may be assumed that actual prices
for land sales are somewhat higher than the reference price. Prices for some
79,000 locations are published but it is not possible to map these to registered
private land at the required level of detail, and the listings do not include
information on the size of areas to which they refer, making it impossible to
compute meaningful averages.

What Treasury Department listings do tell us is that reference prices
vary widely in the country as a whole and in most provinces. The ratio of the price
at the 90 percentile to the price at the 10 percentile in the national listing is
th
th
over 130:1. In most provinces the ratio is 20 or 30:1. In one or two provinces
such as Rayong with little remaining cheap land the ratio comes down to little
over 4:1. The ratio for Bangkok is nearly 8:1. These and median or modal prices
in the listing for each province give a rough picture of land price levels and
variation, but we hesitate to use this evidence directly to calculate average prices
and the value of land in the country as a whole.

An alternative and presumptively more indicative source of evidence
is statistics of the number and value of land transactions in Thailand published
by the Real Estate Information Centre (REIC) of the Government Housing Bank,
documenting annual transfers of ownership recorded by the Department of
Lands with breakdown by province. The property types considered here
are 'detached house' and 'vacant land', meaning land without built structures.
A proportion of the value of a house sale (here assumed to average 30%) represents
the value of residential land. Sales of 'vacant land' in less densely occupied
provinces are assumed to be representative of farm land. Estimation of price per
unit area (rai or square wa) once again requires an additional number, the

average size of plot. This is not revealed in the published statistics and thus
has to be assumed.

100 The Value of Land in Thailand Today

5/1/2565 BE 09:03
_21-0619(085-112)6.indd 100 5/1/2565 BE 09:03
_21-0619(085-112)6.indd 100