How to Sell Land in Chiang Dao: An Owner's Guide
This page is written for owners, not buyers. It covers what actually happens from the day you decide to sell to the day the money lands, with the numbers you can check and the places people usually lose out.
One: the documents to gather
The original title document. This is the starting point, and what kind it is decides whether you can sell at all.
A Chanote (น.ส.4 จ.) is full ownership, GPS-surveyed, freely sellable, leasable and mortgageable.
A Nor Sor 3 Gor (น.ส.3 ก.) is a confirmed possessory right whose boundaries were fixed by an aerial-photo survey at 1:5000. It is registrable at the Land Office, and because the boundaries are already fixed, a transfer needs no public notice period.
A Nor Sor 3 (น.ส.3) has the same legal basis and is registrable and mortgageable, but its boundaries have not been precisely surveyed. A transfer therefore requires a 30-day public notice period so anyone can contest it. Tell your buyer that at the start, not on the day you book the appointment.
A Nor Sor 2 (น.ส.2) is a temporary land-use consent, not a possessory or ownership title, and cannot be transferred except by inheritance.
Sor Kor 1 (ส.ค.1) and Por Bor Tor 5 or 6 (ภ.บ.ท.5 / ภ.บ.ท.6) are not title documents. The Land Office will not register any transaction against them and banks will not mortgage them.
Sor Por Kor 4-01 cannot be sold on the open market at all. We have a separate guide for that.
ID card or passport, to confirm that the name offering the land matches the name on the title. If the land is in a company's name, bring the company documents too.
A power of attorney, if you cannot attend. The Land Department accepts only its own prescribed forms — Tor Dor 21 for land and houses, Chor 21 for condominiums. No other format is accepted. Signed abroad, the chain is: notarisation in that country, then authentication at a Royal Thai Embassy or Consulate — Thailand is not a party to the Apostille Convention — then in some cases further legalisation by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then a certified Thai translation of the whole document including every notarial annotation. Our source gives a few days to about ten business days for the embassy step, plus the ministry's time on top: allow up to four weeks in a busy period.
One honest gap: our sources do not list the house registration book (tabien baan) or spousal consent among a seller's own requirements, so we have not put them here rather than guess. When you call the Land Office to book, ask them to read you the full document list.
Two: transfer day at the Land Office
Both parties attend in person, or their attorneys under a power of attorney do. There are four steps.
First, the officer verifies the documents and the identities — title deed, ID or passport, company documents where a party is corporate — and confirms the title type and any encumbrances on it.
Second, the transfer fee, the taxes and the stamp duty or specific business tax are calculated and paid at the Land Office cashier.
Third, the transfer instrument is signed in front of a Land Officer.
Fourth, the updated title deed is issued in the buyer's name.
If the title is a Nor Sor 3, the 30-day public notice period has to run before any of this can proceed.
What we cannot tell you, because our sources do not say, is how many hours the day takes, how the queue works, or what hours the Chiang Dao branch office keeps. Telephone the office before you go, and do not trust opening hours that did not come from an official page.
Three: who pays what
This is where owners most often lose money, by settling it on the day.
Transfer fee, 2%, calculated on the government-appraised value. Market custom is to split it evenly between buyer and seller, and all of it is negotiable.
There was a temporary reduction to 0.01% for homes and condominiums valued up to ฿7 million, running from 22 April 2025 to 30 June 2026. Several sources note that the reduced rate applies to Thai nationals and residential purchases rather than generally to raw land bought by a company, so it needs to be verified transaction by transaction.
Specific business tax, 3.3%, applies where the seller has held the property for under five years, calculated on the higher of the appraised value or the transaction value.
Stamp duty, 0.5%, applies instead at five years or more. The two are mutually exclusive — never both.
Withholding tax is an advance against the seller's own income tax on the sale, calculated by a progressive formula tied to the government-assessed value and the number of years of ownership. Some sources approximate it at around 1% of the appraised value, while saying themselves that the real calculation is more complex; the Land Office works it out at the counter.
Who customarily pays which. By custom the seller carries the specific business tax or stamp duty and the withholding tax, and the transfer fee is split. But all of this is market custom, not law. Write it into the sale agreement explicitly, and you never have to argue about it at the counter.
Outstanding land and building tax is worth clearing first, because unpaid tax attaches to the land. Agricultural land runs at roughly 0.01% to 0.15% of appraised value, residential up to 0.3%, and land left vacant starts at 0.3% and rises by 0.3 percentage points every three years to a 3% ceiling, specifically to discourage land-banking. A 2026 enforcement drive is targeting land registered as agricultural to claim the lowest rate without genuine farming, which is directly relevant around here.
Four: how not to be taken advantage of by a broker
Thailand has no mandatory national real-estate broker licence and no compulsory exam. Voluntary professional credentials exist and confer credibility, but nothing is legally required. Our sources even conflict on whether a provincial-level requirement exists, which is a question worth putting to the Land Office directly.
The consequence of an unregulated market is that one agent can represent both the buyer and the seller at once, without disclosing it, and collect from both sides. That is why the question to ask is simply who else they are representing — and why the answer belongs in writing.
Customary commission is 3% to 5% of the sale price, paid by the seller, and it is generally already built into the advertised price. No law fixes the rate, so it is negotiable. Anybody telling you 5% is a fixed standard is telling you something that is not true.
What belongs in writing from day one: the rate as a number, when it is payable, out of which funds, whether the arrangement is exclusive, and when an exclusive arrangement ends. Our sources say nothing about exclusivity norms in Thailand at all, so treat it as entirely yours to set.
The failures that actually cost people money are double-selling — deposits taken from several buyers for the same parcel — and forged Chanotes. A genuine Chanote carries specific security features: a Garuda watermark in a double circle, luminous corner-marker holes, and a black-ink dated signature and stamp on the reverse. But the only reliable check is an in-person search at the Provincial Land Office against the registry itself, not an inspection of the paper copy somebody hands over. A serious buyer will want to do that, and you should welcome it.
One more that hits sellers directly: a lease of more than three years that was never registered is enforceable for only three years, and does not bind a subsequent purchaser. If there is a tenant on your land, settle that before you go to market.
Five: what buyers ask first
Across the land adverts in Chiang Dao district, the first question is almost always what title document does it have.
Our own data shows why. Among the six cheapest listings at or under ฿1.2 million, only one states a Chanote. The other five state no title type at all. That silence is itself the signal, and buyers who read this market know it.
Which means your listing stands out simply by naming the document. Across the 138 listings we hold that state both a price and a size, the ones that name a title document carry a higher median price per rai than the ones that do not.
The questions after that, in order, are is there road frontage — the single most common selling point in adverts here — then water and electricity, then whether the plot touches a stream, and then whether the seller is the owner or an agent, which buyers ask because it changes how they negotiate.
One last thing worth knowing. Prices advertised on English-language portals aimed at foreign buyers and prices on Thai-language portals are far apart. One English-language portal shows a median list price of ฿9,742,502 and a median of ฿2,408 per square wa — about ฿963,200 per rai — while Thai-language portals carry comparable valley land at ฿250,000 to ฿900,000 per rai. Know that so you price wrong in neither direction.
As for how long land takes to sell in Chiang Dao: we have no data on that, and we will not guess.
What we can do
Send us the title document and we read it, and tell you what it is and what it allows. If you want to sell, we write the listing in both languages and publish it here. You are not tied to us.
We work remotely. We do not visit the land and we do not photograph your plot. The work that needs someone standing on the ground — walking the boundary, checking the access — is still yours and your buyer's. What we do is make the paperwork stop being a mystery.