Burns). Well, this is the situation that our featured speaker John Fishback found himself in. After
much diligent preparation on the rights and remedies for condominium owners in Thailand gleaned
through experience and research, most of it became a moot point. Thailand adopted a new
Condominium Act, which is reportedly going into effect on July 4, 2008. So, John hurriedly worked to
get the new Act translated from Thai to English. Although the translation was not completed, John
was able to provide an over view of the key changes in the Act. He noted that the new Act will impact
on developers, owners, and renters.
John said the new Act requires the developer to register certain documents at the Land Office
including: (a) title documents showing the actual land site and identify commonly owned areas, which
must be used for that purpose; (b) diagram showing access to the nearest public road; (c) sales
brochure (John also recommended that it be made an addendum to the sales contract and cautioned
that if the developer doesn’t want to do it, you need to seriously reconsider your purchase); and (d) a
copy of the condominium regulations.
The new Act requires that each condominium title document identify the ownership ratio based on
area rather than price, which some developers have been doing (John noted that one of the abuses
by unscrupulous developers was to assign an arbitrary high price to a small area owned by the
developer; thus allowing the developer a greater vote than the others with larger space or conversely,
assigning a low value to greater space in order to reduce their financial obligation for maintenance
and common area operations when they have a large number of unsold units). The Act also requires
an Office be included for the Juristic Person, which represents the condominium as an entity when
dealing with others.
The Act also sets forth the minimum number of persons that are to be on the committee representing
the owners at 3 with a maximum of 9. It also sets forth specific requirements for conducting the