Inheriting a Koh Phangan condo when the foreign quota is already full: Condominium Act Section 19/7

If you inherit a freehold condo unit on Koh Phangan as a foreign heir, do you automatically get to keep it in your own name? Not necessarily. The building's 49% foreign-ownership quota must still be satisfied at the moment you acquire the unit — and if the quota is already full, or you don't otherwise meet Section 19's ownership conditions, Condominium Act Section 19/7 doesn't let you register title. Instead it starts a clock: 60 days to notify the Land Office in writing, and one year to sell. This is a distinct mechanism from the Land Code Section 93 rule forcing a foreign heir who inherits land itself to dispose of it within a year — that guide covers land, where the constraint is the blanket ban on foreign land ownership; this one covers condo units, where the constraint is a building-wide ownership ratio that can fill up independently of anything the heir does.

The 60-day notice, one-year sale clock

• 60-day notification — an unqualified foreign heir must notify the competent Land Office official in writing within 60 days of acquiring ownership of the unit.
• One-year disposal — the heir then has up to one year from that same acquisition date to sell the unit.
• Applies either way — whether the heir inherits under a will as a named legatee or as a statutory heir under intestate succession; see the five legal forms of a Thai will and the statutory-heir order without one.
• The clock doesn't start in a vacuum — before either deadline is even reachable, a Thai court must first appoint an estate administrator, the mandatory procedural step covered in the estate-administrator guide. Probate delay eats into the one-year window, it doesn't run separately from it.

If the year runs out: a forced sale, not a free pass

Section 19/7 applies the fourth paragraph of Section 19 quinque "mutatis mutandis" if the heir doesn't dispose of the unit in time — which authorises the Director-General of the Land Department to arrange the sale on the heir's behalf, retaining a 5% fee from the sale price before any other deductions or taxes. At that point the Land Department, not the heir, controls the timing and effectively the buyer — a forced sale is not built to get the best price.

Is there a way to keep it instead of selling?

Section 19/7 itself provides no requalification path — an unqualified heir cannot simply become qualified and register the inherited unit in their own name. The practical workaround reported by Thai property lawyers is different: the heir (or another family member) can separately buy the unit from the estate using Section 19's ordinary foreign-buyer qualification route — remitting foreign currency into Thailand equal to the government-appraised value, converting it to baht, and completing an FET-form-documented purchase like any other foreign condo buyer. That's a fresh purchase transaction, not an exception written into the inheritance rule, and it only helps if the building's quota has room again by the time it happens — for instance because another unit resold to a Thai buyer in the meantime.

Why the quota-full risk is easy to miss

• A condo's foreign quota isn't fixed at your own purchase — it's a building-wide ratio that shifts every time another unit resells to a Thai or foreign buyer over the years you own yours.
• A unit bought comfortably inside the 49% quota today can still land a future heir outside it, if enough other units flip to foreign ownership before the inheritance happens.
• Check the juristic person's current foreign-ownership percentage before buying, and periodically afterward if you're estate-planning around leaving the unit to a foreign heir — see condo juristic-person governance for how to request this figure from the committee.
• A Thai heir faces no version of this constraint at all — a real difference for a mixed-nationality family's estate planning, separate from the choice between freehold condo and leasehold villa in the first place.

This isn't a reason to avoid freehold condo ownership if you're planning to leave a unit to non-Thai heirs — but it is a concrete reason to check the building's current foreign-ownership ratio periodically, not just at purchase, and to build the 60-day notification deadline into any estate plan alongside the probate step in the estate-administrator guide.