Phuket Off-Plan Payment Schedules: Instalment Structure by Stage (2026-08)
Description
How developers on Phuket, Thailand structure instalment payments on off-plan property: the number of stages, the share taken at reservation, and how much of the price is paid before the keys change hands. Built from 234 developer payment schedules published on project listings. The headline number is pre-completion exposure. The median buyer pays 90% of the price before receiving the property. The handover instalment clusters hard at 10%: 118 of the 177 schedules with an identifiable handover step, two thirds of them, put exactly 10% there, and another 22 put less. For most projects nine tenths of the money is committed against a building that does not exist yet, secured by contract rather than by possession. Reservation deposits are small and standardised, 2% in 161 of 234 plans, and seven instalments is the dominant structure, used by 130 of 234. The sample is deliberately smaller than the raw count. 560 projects publish a payment schedule; 246 express every stage as a percentage; 234 of those sum to 99-101% and form the analysed set. The rest mix percentages with fixed baht amounts, and averaging a percentage against a baht figure would be meaningless, so they are excluded rather than coerced. The handover metric rests on 177 plans, not 234, because the remainder do not label a stage that can be identified as handover or transfer of ownership; it is reported separately for that reason. These are published schedules, not signed contracts. They are the terms a developer advertises; negotiated terms on an individual unit may differ, and discounts for earlier or fuller payment are common and not visible here. The dataset records what share falls at each milestone, not how many months apart the milestones are, and construction schedules slip. It is not legal or financial advice. Companion datasets from the same catalogue: asking prices by zone (10.5281/zenodo.21776364), same-unit rental yield (10.5281/zenodo.21856263) and beach premium (10.7910/DVN/HDGZPM).
Files
Steps to reproduce
Source: payment schedules published by developers on project listings in the AIProperty Phuket catalogue. Each project stores its schedule as a JSONB array, one element per stage, shaped {payment: 2%, milestone: Immediately, installment: Reservation Deposit}. Selection: a plan enters the analysed set only when every stage is expressed as a percentage and the stages sum to 99-101 per cent. Plans that mix percentages with fixed baht amounts are excluded rather than coerced, because averaging a percentage against a baht figure is meaningless. 560 projects publish a schedule, 246 are percentage-only, and 234 of those are internally consistent and form the analysed set. Handover share: summed over stages whose milestone matches handover or transfer of ownership. 177 of the 234 plans label such a stage; the remainder are dropped from that metric alone, which is why it is reported on its own denominator. Reservation share: the percentage attached to the first stage in array order. The full SQL, including the regular expressions used to parse percentages and identify the handover stage, is in README.md alongside the data.