A friend live in a 5 stories building with all togheter 12 apartments. He and all the others bought there apartments as a "30 years leashold".

Now the owner of the building and land (a thai LTD company) would like to sell the whole building, and my friends and is neigbour wonder if its possibly that they buy the building and to example convert the document from apartments to condominium status, so they can make 49% free hold? Or if you know a better way for my friends to feel that they are the "owner" of their apartments/ condominiums and dont go to be kicked out after the 30 years lease?

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The process of gaining Condominium Juristic Person(CJP) status for a building is detailed in the Condominium Act. It appears to be quite straight forward-however I suspect that you will need some professional advice.

By law a CJP must have:

Regulations

A Manager

A committee

Committee meetings

An Annual General meeting

Audited accounts

The tenants will become co-owners

A Thai company will have to be established to facilitate the transaction. Initially all the chanotes (title deeds) will be issued in the name of this company. With this in place then the transfer can take place from this company to the individual co -owners.

Maintenance fees have to be generated to cover the up keep of the common area.

The Manager can be a co –owner and -the committee must comprise of co –owners. All these positions can be rotated.

All minutes of general meetings must be submitted to your local land office (written in Thai)

You refer to the 49% foreign ownership –of course the remaining 51% has to be owned by Thai nationals or Thai Companies. Thai companies have to be audited annually.

It may be possible ,in the interest of fairness, that the cost of auditing these Thai companies is borne by the maintenance fees. If this were possible ( and I do not know for certain) then the advantage of ownership swings in favour of the Thai companies –since when a particular condo unit is sold in the future –it will not attract transfer taxes-just the cost of replacing names (name of former owner off and name of new owner on).

Alternative types of ‘Fractional Ownership’ schemes have been attempted in Thailand. Typically they have all the characteristic of Time share.

In the event they were simply scams .

So your choices are Apartments (which are un –regulated in law ) and Condominiums which are. This regulation is strictly for the benefit of the co –owners.