The booking fee is not the whole of the cash
A price from a lane in Rueso
Take a house offered at 1,600,000 baht. The seller wants 30,000 baht to stop showing it to other families until the end of the month. That 30,000 is real money. It is also a small slice of the cash a buyer still has to assemble.
These figures are an illustration we use in the Rueso office so a household can see the shape of the problem. The land office applies the rates in force on the day of transfer, and a bank applies its own valuation. Neither of those meetings has happened yet when the booking receipt is written.
What people forget beside the booking
A lender often talks about a down payment near ten percent of price or of the bank's valuation, whichever rule that lender is using that year. Ten percent of 1,600,000 is 160,000. If the seller agrees that the booking fee counts toward that sum, 130,000 is still to be found. If the seller treats the booking fee as a separate holding payment, the full 160,000 may still be asked for. The sale agreement is the place that sentence should be written, and your lawyer is the person who should read it.
Transfer fee is commonly two percent of the registered value. On 1,600,000 that is 32,000 baht, and buyers and sellers argue, house by house, about who pays it. Stamp duty of half a percent, 8,000 baht in this illustration, comes into view when specific business tax does not. Specific business tax, often 3.3 percent, is usually a seller's cost when a property is sold within five years, yet some sellers try to push it into the price you pay. Ask which party is named before you add the booking fee to your savings and call the purchase funded.
Registering a mortgage has its own fee, often discussed around one percent of the loan amount, sometimes eased by a government measure that expires. Ask the land office for the figure that applies in the year you transfer. On a loan of 1,440,000 the unreduced illustration is 14,400 baht. Add a cushion for moving, a water meter, and a month of overlap with rent, and a careful household can be looking at well above 200,000 baht of cash even after the booking fee is paid.
A question to ask before you view again
Write three numbers on one page: cash you can touch without borrowing from a relative who will need it back in a month, the booking fee already paid, and a rough transfer bundle using the illustration above adjusted to your price. If the first number is smaller than the other two combined, the next viewing is a pleasure, not a purchase.
If you want those three numbers built from your own statements rather than from a round example, the deposit mapping sitting is ninety minutes. The readiness review is the longer note, when the monthly side has to be written as carefully as the cash side.