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Buying property - the essentials
• About foreign ownership - land & houses • About foreign ownership - condominiums
• Land titles in Thailand • Taxes on property • Units of land measurement • Legal advice
Units of land measurement
Apart from whether the seller has the right to sell, and the buyer the right to buy – the most important consideration for someone buying a house or a piece of land is: How big is it? In Thailand, this can be another source of initial confusion, as the country has its own system of land measurement. The basic, most commonly used, units are wah and rai. One wah (a linear measurement) is two metres. One rai (a measurement of area) is approximately 0.4 of an acre. Another word you’ll often come across is talang, meaning ‘squared’. Hence one talang wah is one square talang or four square metres. Less frequently, you may come across the word ngan which equates to 100 talang wah or one quarter of a rai.
It gets easier when referring to the area of buildings as opposed to land, as the metric system is used. So, say you are buying a house in a development, the land area will be calculated in talang wah, ngan or rai (depending on how big your plot is) but the area of buildings on that land will be calculated in square metres.
Here are some conversions:
1 wah = 2 metres
1 talang wah = 4 sq metres
1 rai = 1,600 sq metres / 0.4 acres (approx) / 0.16 hectares
1 metre = 0.5 wah
1 sq metre = 0.25 talang wah
1 acre = 2.53 rai
I hectare = 6.25 rai
And how the Thai units build up:
100 talang wah = 1 ngan
400 talang wah / 4 ngan = 1 rai
