Vacancy Risk in Thai Resort Markets: What Phuket Investors Must Know
Vacancy is the primary income threat in a resort market, and the reason it deserves a guide is that it is the risk buyers model least honestly. The trouble is that it is also the risk nobody can measure here.
An earlier version of this page opened with a rental performance database of 892 Phuket properties, gave occupancy swings between named percentages, and carried a month-by-month occupancy table for five areas described as a three-year average. All of it is withdrawn. Thailand keeps no letting register: there is no record of what any privately owned unit was let for, on how many nights, at what rate, and there is no series from which a three-year monthly average could have been drawn. The tables read as measurement and rested on none.
What is left is better than it sounds, because three of the four things that actually drive vacancy are on the record, and the fourth is a document you can ask for.
Driver one: distance to the beach, which the records hold for every scheme
Every project on our list carries a walking time to its nearest beach. Across 299 schemes:
| Walk to the beach | Schemes | Priced units |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 minutes | 62 | 3,346 |
| 11-20 minutes | 44 | 3,367 |
| 21-30 minutes | 19 | 1,323 |
| 31-45 minutes | 46 | 2,228 |
| 46-60 minutes | 40 | 1,665 |
| Over an hour | 88 | 2,393 |
Almost a third of the schemes on the island are more than an hour’s walk from the sea. That is the fact behind “beach-adjacent” as a marketing phrase, and it is checkable per project rather than believed.
The area medians are more revealing than the totals, because they show which beach names travel further than their geography:
| Area | Schemes | Median walk to the beach | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surin | 4 | 10 min | 7-10 |
| Karon | 6 | 11 min | 5-19 |
| Kamala | 9 | 14 min | 3-38 |
| Kata | 8 | 14 min | 8-34 |
| Rawai | 24 | 20 min | 5-71 |
| Nai Harn | 7 | 22 min | 18-46 |
| Patong | 4 | 23 min | 1-120 |
| Nai Yang | 29 | 37 min | 1-143 |
| Bang Tao | 107 | 40 min | 1-130 |
| Layan | 51 | 40 min | 1-134 |
| Naithon | 11 | 96 min | 1-150 |
| Kathu | 6 | 112 min | 100-125 |
| Chalong | 15 | 130 min | 116-148 |
Bang Tao’s median scheme is a forty-minute walk from Bang Tao beach. The label covers a corridor running well inland, and half of its 107 schemes are further from the water than that. The same is true of Layan. Meanwhile Kata, Kamala, Karon and Surin (smaller books, all of them) sit within a quarter of an hour on the median. If your income thesis depends on guests walking to the sea, the area name will not tell you whether they can; the walking time in the scheme’s own record will.
Driver two: how much inventory sits alongside yours
Priced inventory per scheme, across the same 299 projects:
| Priced units in the scheme | Schemes |
|---|---|
| 1-9 | 106 |
| 10-49 | 116 |
| 50-199 | 55 |
| 200-499 | 20 |
The median scheme carries 17 priced units on our list, and none carries more than 398. This is the inventory we hold prices for rather than the building’s total unit count, but it is a fair proxy for how many near-identical units are being sold into the same corridor at the same time, which is what competitive vacancy actually is.
A small book is not automatically safer. It means fewer neighbours undercutting you, and it also means fewer owners to share a manager with and less bargaining weight when the fee is set. What matters is knowing which of the two you are buying into before you sign, not after.
Driver three: what is arriving after you
Competitive vacancy is created by units that do not exist yet. That is countable from delivery dates:
| Delivery | Schemes | Priced units |
|---|---|---|
| Already finished | 39 | 918 |
| 2026 | 91 | 3,689 |
| 2027 | 101 | 5,578 |
| 2028 | 27 | 2,753 |
| 2029 | 10 | 477 |
| No date stated | 31 | 907 |
Bang Tao alone has 4,687 units still under construction against 446 finished apartments today. Layan has 2,378, Rawai 1,321, Kata 1,052. Add the units due in the two years after your own handover, set them against what the corridor holds finished, and you have the supply question answered in numbers rather than in adjectives.
Where the evidence exists, and where it does not
A fourth number decides whether you can answer the vacancy question at all before buying: how much finished stock your area holds. Vacancy evidence lives in owner statements, and statements exist only where units have been let, which requires a building that is standing.
Across our records, 871 of 12,054 priced apartments sit in a completed scheme, 25 of 127 apartment projects. By area:
| Area | Finished priced apartments | Median price of finished stock (THB) |
|---|---|---|
| Bang Tao | 446 | 5,775,000 |
| Wichit | 139 | 3,690,000 |
| Kathu | 71 | 4,570,000 |
| Nai Yang | 55 | 3,750,504 |
| Karon | 49 | 6,594,486 |
| Rawai | 47 | 8,047,200 |
| Surin | 29 | 6,270,000 |
| Naithon | 23 | 7,310,000 |
| Kamala | 7 | 8,669,860 |
| Nai Harn | 5 | 2,800,000 |
Kata, Patong, Layan and Chalong hold no finished priced apartments at all. In those areas, the honest position is that nobody buying today can be shown a letting record from the corridor they are buying into, and any operator producing month-by-month statements must be drawing them from a neighbouring area with different demand.
Bang Tao is the opposite case. It holds more than half the island’s finished apartment stock, so it is the one corridor where the diligence in this guide can actually be completed rather than approximated. That is a genuine advantage of the area, and it has nothing to do with the occupancy claims the old version of this page attached to it.
The comparison worth making, when you have narrowed to two areas, is this: finished units today against units still to arrive. Bang Tao holds 446 finished and has 4,687 under construction. Rawai holds 47 and has 1,321 coming. Kamala holds 7 and has 733. In each case the second number is the competition your unit will face; the first is the size of the evidence base you can draw on before committing to face it.
Driver four: the letting permission, which is a document
Letting for stays under 30 days engages the Hotel Act licensing regime. A building whose bylaws impose a 30-day minimum has closed the nightly market to you regardless of how good the location is, and that changes the tenant you are looking for from a holidaymaker to a monthly resident, a different rate, a different agent, a different unit size.
This is a yes-or-no answer available before you commit. Ask for it in writing.
Ask for the empty months, not the annual average
Every set of figures we send states what the records hold and what they do not, including the parts that make the case look worse.
Vacancy risk factors and how to check each one
The table below used to attach a percentage-point impact to every factor. Those impacts are withdrawn, none was measured, and they invited buyers to add them up as if the arithmetic meant something. The factors themselves are real, and each one has a check attached.
| Risk factor | How to check it, before reserving |
|---|---|
| Distance from the beach | The walking time in the scheme’s record, and your own walk at the hour guests would do it |
| Letting permission and the 30-day rule | Written confirmation of the building’s bylaws and licence position |
| Manager’s channel presence | Their live listings, counted yourself, with the review history on each |
| Amenity specification | The spec sheet, and whether the amenities are built or promised |
| Developer’s delivered record | Their completed Phuket projects, which either exist or do not |
| New supply in the corridor | The delivery table above, for your area and the two years after handover |
| Marketing languages | Which languages their live listings are actually published in |
| Furnishing and refurbishment cycle | The refurbishment obligation in the management agreement, in writing |
How developer and management quality affects vacancy
Managers differ, and the differences show up in vacancy before they show up anywhere else. What cannot be done is to price the difference in advance: the occupancy premiums this section used to attribute to top-tier, average and poor management were not measured, because nothing measures Phuket occupancy at all, and they are withdrawn.
What separates managers, checkably:
- Channel breadth. Look at their live listings across the major platforms yourself, rather than accepting a count.
- Pricing discipline. Compare their asking rates on a peak week and a shoulder week. Either the price moves with demand or it does not, and you can see which.
- Review history. A long review record on live listings is evidence of booking volume. A new page with a handful of reviews is evidence of nothing yet.
- Reporting format. Ask for a sample monthly statement. It should itemise gross bookings, platform fees, maintenance and the net remitted. A single net figure is a request to take performance on trust.
- Coordination in the building. Ask how many units in the same building they run and whether low-season pricing is coordinated. Buildings where every owner discounts alone are where competitive vacancy does its damage.
Red flags for high-vacancy projects
Location: an actual drive rather than a walk to the nearest beach, checked against the scheme’s record; construction on adjacent plots with no stated completion; a flood-prone position, which matters most in the September-October window; poor ride-hailing reliability, which you can test on the visit.
Developer and project: a guaranteed yield offered without any statement history behind it; a scheme so small that you will be one of very few owners funding a manager, or so large that you compete with dozens of identical units; no management company contracted at the point of sale; a high proportion of unsold developer-held stock after completion.
Market: the delivery table above showing heavy completions in your corridor in the two years after handover; several comparable schemes finishing in the same window; a developer with a record of delayed completion.
Financial: a rental pool projection that states an occupancy figure at all, since no such figure has been measured for any Phuket zone; a management fee quoted below the customary 20 to 30% of gross without an explanation of what is excluded; no independent legal review of the rental pool agreement.
How to assess a project’s vacancy risk
Step 1, location audit. Visit at several times of day, including the evening. Test ride-hailing availability. Walk to the beach and time it against what the record says. Count competing schemes within a few hundred metres.
Step 2, management due diligence. Ask for month-by-month owner statements from comparable units, with deductions itemised. Check the manager’s live listings and review history. Ask for references from current owners in the pool, and call them.
Step 3, supply check. Take your corridor’s row from the delivery table above and ask the developer what else they know of that is completing nearby.
Step 4, build the model from the cost side. The old version of this step told you to assume an occupancy figure and a rate. Do not: both are unmeasured, and assuming them is how a projection becomes a story. Fix what is real first, the operator’s share of gross from the agreement, the common area rate per square metre from the juristic person, the sinking fund, the statutory transfer taxes, the annual maintenance, and then ask what income would be needed to cover them. That figure is the question you take to the manager, rather than a number they hand you.
Step 5, legal review of the rental pool agreement. The manager’s obligations, your termination rights, and what happens to income if you withdraw from the pool.
Low and high season strategy
The seasonal split is real and structural: the November-to-April window is the dry season and May to October is the southwest monsoon. What that does to occupancy is the part nobody measures, but the responses are still worth stating.
What tends to work in the quiet months: monthly letting rather than nightly, which trades rate for certainty; longer-stay packages aimed at remote workers who deliberately choose the cheaper months; corporate housing arrangements; group bookings for retreats and similar, which follow a different calendar from leisure tourism.
What tends not to: aggressive nightly discounting, which changes the guest and damages the review record that feeds future bookings; leaving the unit dark to preserve it, since a listing with no recent bookings ranks worse; and seasonal closure, which is expensive to reverse.
Where vacancy actually comes from
Vacancy in a resort market is rarely one problem. It is usually three, and they need separating because the responses are different.
Seasonal vacancy is structural. Phuket’s year has a strong November-to-April season and a quieter May-to-October one, and no amount of marketing changes the weather. The response is a unit that can switch markets, large enough to let monthly when the nightly trade thins, rather than one that depends on a single demand source.
Competitive vacancy is local and fixable. It happens when a large number of near-identical units in the same building or corridor chase the same bookings, and the differentiators reduce to photography, review score and price. The response is presentation, pricing discipline, and buying into a building where coordination exists rather than where every owner discounts alone.
Structural vacancy is the dangerous one. It happens when demand for a format or a location has moved and is not coming back: a corridor overbuilt with one unit type, a building whose licence position closed the nightly market, an inland address sold on a beach story. The response is not operational; it is not buying it in the first place, and the diligence that prevents it is the pipeline question and the permissions question before purchase.
Most owners treat all three as marketing problems and attack them with price. Only the second responds.
What to ask before you buy
Three questions expose most of the vacancy risk in a purchase, and none of them appears in a standard sales conversation.
What did comparable units in this building achieve in May, June, September and October last year, in occupancy and in rate? Those months are where a resort market shows what it really is.
How many units in this building are already committed to a letting programme, and is pricing coordinated in the low season or does each owner discount alone?
And can this unit let monthly if the nightly market thins, which is a question about floor area, layout and the house rules, and which has a yes or no answer available before you commit.
Vacancy scenarios
Frequently Asked Questions
Distance to the beach, and it is the one driver our records measure directly: every scheme carries a walking time. The percentage-point impacts this answer used to give are withdrawn, because nothing measures Phuket occupancy. What the record shows is how wide the variation is, Bang Tao's median scheme is a forty-minute walk from the beach, while Surin's is ten and Karon's eleven. Check the walking time on your specific scheme rather than trusting the area name.
No zone can be ranked on occupancy, and the bands this answer used to give for Bang Tao, Kamala, Surin and Patong are withdrawn: Thailand keeps no letting register, so nothing measures occupancy anywhere on the island. What can be ranked is supply arriving. Bang Tao has 4,687 units still under construction against 446 finished apartments, Layan 2,378, Rawai 1,321 and Kata 1,052, while Patong's entire pipeline is 222 units. Heavy new supply in your corridor is the vacancy risk you can actually see coming.
A guarantee is a contract term, so unlike an occupancy band it is real and quotable, but it is only as strong as whoever owes the money, and the typical percentage and term this answer used to cite are withdrawn as unsourced. Read the clause for who pays, out of what, what happens to your letting rights while it runs, and what happens when it ends. Ask specifically whether the obligation is secured by a third party or is an unsecured promise from the developer.
Ask for month-by-month owner statements from comparable units over a full twelve months, with the deductions itemised, and call current owners in the pool to check what they actually received. Note that this evidence only exists where something is finished, and on our records 871 of 12,054 priced apartments sit in a completed scheme, 25 of 127 apartment projects. In Kata, Karon and Patong nothing is finished at all, so the statements have to come from a neighbouring building.
No, but this page can no longer tell you by how much it thins: the low-season occupancy range and the tourist volume figure this answer used to give were not sourced, and both are withdrawn. What is verifiable is the calendar, November to April is the dry season, May to October the southwest monsoon, and the fact that every operator prices the two differently. Ask a manager for a month-by-month statement across a full twelve months and the split will be in it, for that unit.
For this topic, MORE Group updates live pricing, payment milestones and foreign-quota checks on matching Phuket stock each month. The delivery and price figures cited above come from that file. There is no occupancy file to update, on our side or anyone else’s, which is the reason this guide reads the way it does.
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Maksim Shchegolev
Founder, MORE Group
Founder of MORE Group. Four years in investment banking before moving to Phuket, where he has worked in the local property market since 2018. Oversees developer relationships and every engagement above $300K.
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