Koh Samui property for sale: 167 developer projects, almost all of them finished villas, with prices by district and the rules that shape the island

Samui in one table

Koh Samui’s property market fits on one page because it is small, and it is small on purpose. The island’s planning rules keep buildings low and the hillsides largely empty, its airport is private and expensive, and its developers are for the most part local construction companies that build a handful of villas at a time and sell them finished. Every district that has a project on this site appears in the table below, with figures computed from the cards on 5 September 2026; each card names its source and the date it was read.

Three numbers describe the island better than any brochure. Seventy of the 167 projects start under 10,000,000 THB and 27 at 20,000,000 THB or more, seventeen between 10,000,000 and 20,000,000 THB, and three above, the top being The Heights above Chaweng at 49,000,000 THB. Twenty-three estates have ten homes or fewer, fourteen have between eleven and thirty, and one, Longevity Resort in Bo Phut, has 69. And 30 of the 38 estates are finished, with the other eight all due in 2027, which makes Samui the one Thai market on this site where a buyer chooses between houses that exist rather than plans.

The Samui villas listing filters the 38 estates by district, status and price; the Thailand villa catalogue sets them beside Phuket’s 149 and Pattaya’s 8.

What the island sells, and to whom

Samui sells the finished pool villa, and it sells it to two buyers. The first is the owner-occupier, a retiree or a family or a couple who have holidayed on the island for years and want a house on a hill with the Gulf of Thailand in front of it; this buyer wants a completed estate near Bo Phut or Maenam, a registered lease, and neighbours. The second is the second-home owner who will use the villa for a few months a year and let it in between, and who wants Chaweng or Choeng Mon within reach, a manager, and an estate whose regulations allow the letting. Both buyers arrive by air into an airport that has no low-cost carriers and a ferry that takes ninety minutes, and both accept a quieter island for the privilege.

What Samui does not sell is the condominium in depth. Three low-rise buildings appear on this site: The Ville Condo at Phru Chaweng, a finished building of forty units priced from 2,630,000 THB; The BOON in Bo Phut, sixty units priced from 3,080,000 THB, due 2027 and sold freehold inside the quota; and Palm by the Sea in Maenam, a finished eleven-unit building from 3,700,000 THB sold on a lease. The island’s planning regulation is the reason: buildings near the shore are held to a low height and the hillsides above a set elevation and gradient are closed to construction, so the tower that gives Pattaya and Bangkok their condominium markets cannot be built here. A buyer who wants an apartment near a Samui beach is choosing among a handful of buildings, and the condominium catalogue shows how thin the choice is beside the other three markets.

The districts, one by one

Bo Phut is the island’s north-east and its centre of gravity. It holds Fisherman’s Village and its Friday market, Bang Rak and the Big Buddha pier, Plai Laem and Choeng Mon with their quieter beaches, and the hills behind Chaweng Noi where the sea-view estates sit. It is ten minutes from the airport and twenty from the island’s hospitals, which is why fourteen of its seventeen projects are completed and why its median villa starts at 11,000,000 THB, the highest of the districts with depth. The stock runs from Longevity Resort’s 69 villas from 7,650,000 THB to Spirit Rock Hill’s eight from 27,500,000 THB and The Heights’ nineteen from 49,000,000 THB; the typical estate is five to fifteen villas built by a company whose name appears on two or three other cards.

Maenam and Bang Por run along the north coast west of Bo Phut, from the Maenam pier to the quiet sand at Bang Por. This is where the island’s new small estates are being built and where the entry prices are: Win Win Homes at 3,650,000 THB, Coconut Valley Villas at 7,000,000 THB, Hidden Lotus at 7,300,000 THB and Boho Chic Village at 7,350,000 THB, up to Paradise Spring Village at 20,000,000 THB and Pacific Noma at 18,900,000 THB. Ten of the fifteen projects are completed and five are due in 2027. The beach is long and shallow, the drive to Chaweng is twenty-five minutes, and the buyer is more often a resident than a holidaymaker.

Maret is Lamai, the island’s second town, with a beach as long as Chaweng’s and a fraction of the noise. Four estates sit on the hillsides above it, from Nichakul Villas and Loft Pool Villa Lamai at 7,900,000 and 8,900,000 THB to Park Lane Residence Resort at 16,600,000 THB, due in 2027. Lamai has its own market, hospital clinic and international school, and buyers who choose it usually know the island already.

Na Mueang, Taling Ngam and Lipa Noi are the south and the west, the side of the island that faces the sunset and the Ang Thong marine park. Plots are larger, estates are smaller, the ferry pier at Lipa Noi is near and Chaweng is forty minutes away. The five estates here are all finished, from Chana Village at 6,200,000 THB and Taling Ngam Serenity Villas at 6,300,000 THB to Supalai’s Prime Villa Samui at 17,919,000 THB and Eco Home Samui’s 17 villas from 18,000,000 THB, and they suit the buyer who wants the island rather than its towns.

Chaweng itself, the main tourist town, has no developer project on this site because its beachfront is hotels and its inland is low-rise Thai housing; the estates that market themselves as Chaweng sit in the hills of Bo Phut and Maret and appear there.

Insider tip: the first question on a Samui hillside is not who owns the plot but who owns the track that reaches it. Many hillside estates were built at the end of a private track across a neighbour’s land, and a right of way that was a handshake when the developer built becomes a problem the day you sell. The answer you want is a servitude registered on the neighbour’s title; the land page explains what a servitude is and how to check for one.

The rules that shape the island

Samui looks the way it does because of a planning regulation, and a buyer who understands it reads the market correctly. The island’s town-planning rules hold building height low across the whole island and lower still near the shore, restrict construction on steep slopes and above a set elevation, and require larger projects to pass environmental assessment. The results are visible from the ferry: no towers, villas that step up the hills and stop, and hotels that spread rather than rise. The rules also explain the product on this page, small estates of low villas on plots the developer could permit, and they explain why a hillside villa’s building permit deserves a closer look than a Phuket condominium’s.

Two consequences matter at the point of purchase. A villa built above the permitted elevation or on a slope steeper than the rules allow can be ordered demolished, and a buyer’s lawyer should read the permit against the plot’s survey rather than accept the developer’s assurance. And an estate that has not yet subdivided its land cannot register a buyer’s lease against an individual plot, so a buyer signing before subdivision holds a contract rather than a right until the Land Office has drawn the new deeds. The hillside due diligence guide was written for Phuket and applies to Samui’s hills with the same force.

How a foreigner holds a Samui villa

The structure is the country’s. A foreign buyer owns the villa as a building, registered in their own name, and holds the plot under a lease of no more than 30 years, registered at the Koh Samui branch of the Surat Thani Land Office, or through a Thai limited company with real Thai shareholders, or in a Thai spouse’s name. The lease is a real right for its term and binds any later owner of the land; the further 30-year terms written into many Samui contracts are promises between the parties and should be valued as options, not as years owned. The 30-year lease guide sets out what is registered and what is not.

Samui has a history with the company route. For twenty years villa estates on the island were sold to foreigners through Thai companies whose Thai shareholders held their shares for the buyer, and the enforcement that began in 2025, with the registrar and the Land Office now asking where the Thai shareholders’ money came from, has made those structures a liability at resale. A buyer offered a company today should ask who the Thai shareholders are and what they paid, and should expect the honest answer on a holiday home to be that a lease is the right structure.

Six of the 38 villa estates on this site state the structure the developer offers a foreign buyer: Coconut Valley, Hikaru Garden, Luma Villas and Bocami Villas as leasehold, Boho Chic Village as freehold or a 30-year lease on a Chanote title, Sawasdee Pool Villas as freehold or leasehold. The other 32 cards say the structure is unconfirmed, because the developer has not published it, and the agency asks before any reservation. The three condominiums follow the Condominium Act: The BOON is offered freehold within the 49 percent quota, Palm by the Sea leasehold, and The Ville’s quota position is confirmed at the Land Office on the day.

Finished houses: what 156 of 167 means for the buyer

The ratio inverts everything a buyer has read about buying in Thailand. On Phuket the diligence is the developer, because the house does not exist yet; on Samui the house exists and the diligence is the house, the land under it and the small company that built it.

A completed Samui villa can be surveyed, and should be. The roof, the waterproofing, the pool shell and the retaining walls on a hillside plot are where small builders economise, and a structural survey before the deposit costs a fraction of the first repair. The estate’s accounts, where the estate has an owners’ body, show whether the common road and the water system are being maintained and by whom; on a three-villa estate there may be no body at all, and the buyer should know who will fix the road. The water supply deserves its own question, because Samui has had dry-season shortages and estates on boreholes or tanker deliveries pay more in April than the brochure implies. And the land title should be pulled at the Land Office to confirm that the plot has its own deed, that the deed is a Chanote or a Nor Sor 3 Gor, and that no mortgage or servitude sits on it that the seller forgot to mention.

The eight estates under construction, all due in 2027, are bought the Phuket way: instalments tied to construction stages, a penalty and a refund right if delivery slips, a permit that names the plot, and the developer’s record on its previous estates, which on Samui usually means two or three earlier projects a short drive away that a buyer can visit. The off-plan guide sets out the contract terms.

Reading a Samui card

The cards for the 167 Samui projects were built in 2026 from a registry of sources rather than from the agency’s own price file, and a buyer should read them with that in mind. Each card names the developer where the developer has a public face, gives the number of villas or units, the promised or actual completion year, the lowest published price and the district, and lists the websites read and the date. Where a developer has published the title structure it offers a foreigner, the card says so; where it has not, the card says the structure is unconfirmed rather than guessing leasehold. Twenty-eight of the destination cards across Samui, Pattaya and Bangkok carry a placeholder image because no developer render without an agency watermark was available on the day, and those are replaced as developers send material.

Three fields carry most of the weight on a Samui card. The unit count tells you whether you are buying into an estate with an owners’ body and shared costs or into three houses on a private track. The completion status tells you whether the diligence is the house or the developer. And the developer’s name, where it appears twice or three times in the catalogue, tells you there is a record to inspect on the island: Samui Paradise Villa, Cera Properties, Probuild, Pacific Palisade, Sisaran and Supalai all have earlier estates within a short drive of their current ones, and a visit to the earlier estate is the cheapest survey a buyer can commission.

The Samui purchase, start to finish

A completed Samui villa can go from first call to registered lease in six to ten weeks, and the sequence protects the buyer if it is kept in order. The brief comes first: district, budget in the buyer’s currency, how many months a year the villa will be used, whether it will be let, and how the title will be held. The shortlist follows from the grid above, with video walk-throughs for a buyer abroad and a visit for one on the island. The lawyer, appointed by the buyer and not supplied by the developer, pulls the deed at the Koh Samui Land Office, confirms the subdivision, reads the building permit against the plot’s survey, checks the access road and the water, and reports in writing before any money moves. A refundable reservation then holds the villa for a few weeks while the sale and lease agreements are read. The purchase funds arrive by international transfer from the buyer’s own account, in the buyer’s currency rather than baht, which is what produces the Foreign Exchange Transaction record a seller later needs to send proceeds home. On registration day the lease is endorsed on the land title and the building transferred into the buyer’s name, the fees are paid, and the buyer leaves the Land Office with certified copies of everything. A buyer who cannot be present signs the Land Office’s own power of attorney form, notarised and legalised; the remote purchase guide covers that paperwork.

Samui and Phuket, honestly compared

Buyers arrive at this page having compared the two islands on holiday, and the property comparison is different from the holiday one. The figures are from this site’s catalogue on 5 September 2026.

The comparison is not a verdict. A family with school-age children and a job that needs an airport chooses Phuket; a couple who will live in the house and fly out twice a year chooses Samui and saves half the price for the same pool. The Phuket versus Koh Samui comparison goes deeper on the trade-offs, and the Phuket catalogue puts the island’s 284 projects beside these 41.

What it costs to buy and hold on Samui

Purchase costs are national and modest. A villa buyer pays, on the day the lease is endorsed, a registration fee and stamp duty that together come to about 1.1 percent of the price (1 percent and 0.1 percent of the total rent for the term); where the house is transferred as an existing building rather than built under the buyer’s own permit, a 2 percent transfer fee applies and is shared as the contract says; the seller’s specific business tax of 3.3 percent or stamp duty of 0.5 percent and withholding tax are the seller’s by law; and legal fees for a lease purchase start near 60,000 THB. A condominium buyer pays the 2 percent transfer fee, shared, a sinking fund contribution set per square metre, and the first common-area fee. The 0.01 percent transfer relief advertised on some listings until June 2027 belongs to Thai individual buyers of homes priced up to 7,000,000 THB; a foreign purchase pays the full rate.

Holding a Samui villa costs more than holding a condominium of the same price, and more than holding the same villa in a Phuket estate, because the estates are small and the bills are not shared. The yearly Land and Building Tax, 0.02 percent of the assessed value for a home, is trivial; the pool contract, the gardener, the building insurance, the borehole pump or the water deliveries, and the private road are not, and on a three-villa estate the owners pay for the road themselves. Ask a completed estate for two years of accounts, and ask a small one who has been paying for the road. The tax guide carries the statutory detail.

Letting a Samui villa

Samui’s rental market is a holiday market, and most second-home owners let their villas for part of the year. The law is the national one: a tenancy of a month or longer needs no licence, nightly letting is hotel business under the Hotel Act unless the house is registered with the district office as a small establishment (no more than four rooms and twenty guests), and each foreign guest goes on a TM30 notification. Estates add their own rules, and a buyer who intends to let should read them before reserving. Rent paid to an owner who is not a Thai tax resident carries 15 percent withholding; an owner who spends 180 days or more on the island files a Thai return with the 30 percent standard deduction.

No income, occupancy or nightly-rate figure appears on this page, because Thailand keeps no letting register and Samui’s small estates publish nothing; a villa manager on the island can show an owner the actual statements of comparable villas, and that is the only honest basis for a model.

Getting there and living there

Samui’s airport belongs to Bangkok Airways, which flies from Bangkok in about an hour and, in season, from Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, at fares well above Phuket’s; the ferries from Donsak on the mainland take about ninety minutes and carry cars. The island’s two private hospitals, Bangkok Hospital Samui in Chaweng and Samui International Hospital in Bo Phut, treat foreigners in English and refer complex cases to Bangkok. Four international schools serve the expatriate families, in Chaweng, Bo Phut, Maenam and Lamai. The ring road around the island takes about ninety minutes to drive; the interior is steep and mostly closed to building. Water is the island’s structural weakness in the dry season, electricity arrives by undersea cable from the mainland, and fibre internet reaches the towns and most estates. Visas are a separate question from ownership, and the routes most Samui owners use, the retirement extension, the Destination Thailand Visa and the Long-Term Resident visa, are set out in the guides to the retirement extension, the Destination Thailand Visa and the Long-Term Resident visa.

What the market data says about Samui

Thailand’s official statistics measure condominium transfers to foreigners, and Samui has almost no condominiums, so the island’s foreign market is unmeasured by the state. The Real Estate Information Center’s half-year 2025 figure, 6,533 condominium units passing to foreigners for 28.267 billion THB, is a count of Bangkok, Chonburi and Phuket. What exists for Samui is reporting: The Nation put the island’s villa-led development pipeline at 53 billion THB in 2026, and C9 Hotelworks’ 2026 review of Asia’s residential market named Samui as the next branded villa market after Phuket, with the first hotel-branded estates now on the Chaweng and Choeng Mon hills. Neither source says what a Samui villa earns or what it will be worth, and this page does not either.

Who buys Samui, and where each buyer tends to land

The couple who will live there. A completed two- or three-bedroom pool villa in Maenam or Bo Phut from about 7,000,000 THB, on an estate with neighbours and a registered lease, near the north-coast beach and twenty minutes from the hospital. Half the price of the same house in Phuket, and available this month.

The family with school-age children. Bo Phut or Lamai within reach of the international schools, on a completed estate with accounts, having first decided that Samui’s airport and school choice are enough; the alternative is Phuket’s Cherng Talay.

The second-home owner who lets between visits. Bo Phut’s Chaweng hills or Choeng Mon, on an estate whose regulations permit letting and where a manager is on the island, with the first branded estates as the top of the range.

The buyer of a quiet house on a large plot. The south and west, Taling Ngam and Lipa Noi, where the five estates are finished, the plots are larger, and Chaweng is forty minutes away.

The buyer who wants an apartment. One of three buildings, and a candid conversation about whether Samui is the right island for a condominium at all.

How MORE Group works on Samui

MORE Group holds a Phuket agency licence and keeps its own people on Samui; the 167 projects here have passed the agency’s registry check, every figure on a card carries its source and date, and a field the developer has not confirmed stays empty. Twenty-eight destination cards still show placeholders until developers send renders. Developers pay the fee on new-build sales, so the buyer pays the published price. For that the buyer gets a shortlist built to a written brief, title, subdivision, road and water checks by a lawyer of the buyer’s choosing, a contract read, the money routed from abroad correctly, and the Land Office day on the island, with a straight answer whenever an estate falls short. Buyers weighing Samui against the rest of the country can start from the Thailand property guide or the whole catalogue.