Why an offshore family trust can't hold your Thai villa or land

Can a foreign family trust — set up in Jersey, Singapore, the US or anywhere else — hold a villa or land on Koh Phangan? No. Thai law does not recognise trusts for private estate or succession planning, and there is no mechanism to register a trustee as the legal owner of Thai real estate. A trust deed drafted abroad has no effect on title registered at a Thai Land Office.

Why Thai law blocks it

• Civil and Commercial Code Section 1686 — in force since the Code's adoption in 1935 — states that a trust created directly or indirectly, whether by will or by any other juristic act, during life or after death, has no effect whatsoever under Thai law.
• The one statutory exception doesn't help families — the Trust for Transactions in Capital Market Act B.E. 2550 (2007) created a narrow, SEC-regulated trust framework, but only for capital-market instruments such as REITs and securitisation vehicles. It has no application to residential property or family succession.
• A private trust law has been stuck since 2018 — the Cabinet approved a draft Private Trust Act in July 2018 that would have allowed Thai real estate to be held in trust, but as of 2026 the bill remains under review at the Office of the Council of State and has not been enacted. Until it is, the general prohibition stands.

What happens if you try anyway

• No registrable title — the Land Department records only a direct legal owner (an individual or a properly qualified juristic person) on a chanote or other title deed. There is no title category for 'trustee for' a foreign beneficiary.
• It collapses into a nominee problem — if a Thai or foreign trustee is put on title while a foreign settlor supplies the money and controls the asset in substance, the arrangement reads to the Land Department and DSI as an unlawful nominee structure under the Foreign Business Act and Land Code Section 96, not a trust. See Villa held by a Thai company: buyer due diligence for how aggressively that risk is now enforced.
• The beneficiary has no proprietary right — under Thai civil law, a beneficiary's claim against an offshore trustee is a personal contractual claim enforceable (if at all) in the trustee's home jurisdiction — not a right in the land itself that a Thai court will recognise or that survives the trustee's death, bankruptcy or a dispute with co-beneficiaries.
• Succession gets harder, not easier — if the trustee is a natural person who dies, the Thai asset can become entangled in the trustee's own estate administration, in whichever jurisdiction that trustee was domiciled, before any beneficiary sees it.

What actually works instead

• A Thai will — governed by Civil and Commercial Code Sections 1686–1692, a properly drafted Thai-language will naming Thai executors is the standard, enforceable way to direct who inherits a villa, land or leasehold on your death. See Inheritance: leasehold and villa.
• Registered property rights to split use from ownership during your lifetime — usufruct, superficies, the right of habitation or sap-ing-sith can each give a spouse, partner or child a lifetime or fixed-term right to occupy or use the property without transferring the underlying title. See Superficies vs usufruct vs lease and Sap-Ing-Sith: Thailand's fifth registered property right.
• A genuinely operating Thai company, structured under the real 49/51 rules for an active business — not a shell built solely to hold one villa — remains a lawful, if administratively heavier, ownership route. See A Thai company for property (49/51).
• Foreign heirs inheriting directly face their own separate rule — Land Code Section 93's one-year disposal requirement — covered in Foreign heir inheriting Thai land.

The fix for cross-border estate planning in Thailand isn't a trust — it's combining a Thai will with the right registered property right, and coordinating that with your home-country trust or will so the two don't conflict. A lawyer who drafts both sides is worth the fee; a trust deed alone, however well drafted at home, will not move a Thai title.