Wiring Money for a Condo Purchase: The Form Your Lawyer Will Ask For

This is the one where the wire wording actually matters. Everywhere else on this site, I’ve been telling people not to overthink the paperwork — immigration mostly just wants a balance letter, banks mostly just want your details to match. Condo purchases are the exception. Get the transfer wrong here and the Land Office can simply refuse to register the unit in your name, full stop, on the day you were supposed to close.

The good news is that the requirement is narrow and well defined once you know what it’s actually asking for.

The rule: it has to arrive as foreign currency

Thai law only lets a foreigner own a condo unit freehold if the purchase money was brought into Thailand from abroad, in foreign currency, and converted to baht by a Thai bank once it landed. Not sent as baht. Not paid out of a baht account you already happen to hold here. The conversion has to happen inside Thailand, on the way in, for this specific purchase.

That distinction is the whole guide, really. Everything below is either proving that happened, or making sure it happens correctly in the first place.

FET form, or just a bank letter?

Which document you get back depends on the size of the transfer, and this is where our retirement-visa guide and this one connect: the same USD 50,000 line shows up in both, it just means something different here.

• USD 50,000 or more, in one transfer. Your Thai bank is required to issue a Foreign Exchange Transaction (FET) form — a Bank of Thailand document recording the conversion. This is the form the Land Office actually wants at registration.
• Under USD 50,000. No FET form gets generated automatically, but your bank can issue a confirmation or credit-advice letter for the same conversion on request — ask for it when the money lands, not months later when you’re standing at the Land Office trying to reconstruct a transfer from March.

Either document is issued by the bank that received and converted the money — never by the Land Office, never by the developer, and not something you can generate yourself after the fact.

Getting the wire wording right

Before you send anything, the purpose-of-transfer field on the wire needs to say what the money is actually for. Thai officialdom is specific about this — the wording that satisfies both the receiving bank and, later, the Land Office is along the lines of:

“For purchase of condominium unit [unit number], [name of the condominium project], by [your full name exactly as it appears on your passport].”

A few habits that keep this clean:

1. Match your passport name exactly on both the sending and receiving ends — a dropped middle name is the single most common reason a bank flags a large incoming property transfer for manual review.
2. Send the full purchase amount in as few transfers as practical. Multiple smaller wires spread over weeks make it harder for the bank to tie the conversion documents back to one purchase, and can push you below the FET threshold on any single transfer even though the total purchase is well above it.
3. Tell your bank in advance if you’re a Thai permanent resident. PR holders are allowed to pay for a condo in baht without triggering the foreign-currency requirement at all — a narrow exception, but worth knowing if it applies to you.

What to actually keep

Once the money has landed and converted, collect three things before you get anywhere near the Land Office: the FET form or bank confirmation letter, the SWIFT confirmation your home bank gave you when the wire went out, and a copy of the sale and purchase agreement showing the unit number and price. Your lawyer or the developer’s transfer team will ask for all three on closing day — better to hand them over than to be searching your inbox for a SWIFT reference while a queue forms behind you.