We have published a Phuket Villa Price and Rental Yield Index: what villas and houses are being asked across the island, district by district, drawn from our own catalogue and recomputed every day. It is ZEN Real Property's index, built from ZEN Real Property's own listings. It carries no official or industry-body status, and it does not measure the whole island — it measures our book, which is a large sample of the luxury end of the market and the one sample we can vouch for line by line.
Why it exists
Thailand has no open register of what property actually sells for. The state publishes an appraised value, but that is a valuation set for assessing tax rather than a record of what anybody paid — it is the number the Land Office works from at the counter, not the price on the contract. The price itself is not published. So nobody can publish deed-based medians for Phuket, and every Phuket price figure in circulation is an asking price, whether or not the publisher says so. Ours says so, at the top of the page.
The second reason is more awkward and more useful. Our catalogue holds what a villa is asking today; it keeps no trail of what it asked last month. A price that changes overwrites the old one and leaves nothing behind. So the index freezes a permanent edition each month, and from the first edition onwards those editions are the only price history this catalogue has. That is the real argument for reading them.
What it covers
- Villas and houses only. Condominiums and apartments are excluded. They are a different asset at a different price per square metre, and mixing them in would move a district median further than a year of price drift.
- The luxury segment — from ฿10 million to buy and ฿80,000 a month to rent. That is the same floor every browse and search page on this site applies, so the index can never contradict the counters on a district page.
- Available at the time of reading. Reserved and let properties are left out; their prices are already historic.
- Long-term rent, quoted monthly, on leases of six to twelve months. Holiday lets are a different market at several times the rate and are not in here.
- Every district with stock, plus an island-wide row.
How the numbers are built
Medians, not averages. The figure published is the middle listing, taken as it stands rather than interpolated, so every number on the page is one real property's number. A single very large estate cannot move it.
A median is published only off at least five listings. Below that the row shows its count and no figure. A dash on the table is not missing data — it is a refusal to print a median off a sample too thin to carry one.
Yields are paired, property by property. Where a villa is offered for sale and for long-term rent at the same time, it gives a gross figure of its own: its own monthly rent times twelve, divided by its own asking price. The district number is the median of those. A yield is published only where at least four properties in that district are listed both ways.
That rule is the whole point of the column. The obvious shortcut is to take a district's median rent, multiply by twelve and divide by its median sale price — and it is wrong, because the two medians describe two different sets of villas. Rental stock skews smaller than sale stock, so the ratio flatters the yield. Pairing each property against itself removes the problem rather than apologising for it.
Most districts never carry four villas listed both ways. Those rows also show an estimate built from the district's own two per-square-metre medians, which cancels the size difference without pretending to be a pairing. It is labelled an estimate wherever it appears, and it is never mixed into the paired column.
One more guard, unglamorous and necessary: a monthly rent above a sane ceiling is dropped before the medians are taken. It is almost always a nightly holiday rate typed into a monthly field, and a single one left in would move a district's rent median by itself.
What it does not tell you
- Asking, never achieved. What a villa is offered at is not what it sells or lets for.
- Two different pools. Outside the paired yield column, the villas on the sale side and the villas on the rent side are not the same properties.
- Gross, never net. Nothing is taken off for management, maintenance, common-area charges, vacancy or tax. A realistic net on a managed Phuket villa lands meaningfully below the gross figure, as our earlier yield work sets out.
- One agency's book. It is our catalogue, not a census of the island, and it says so on every surface it appears on.
Quote the edition, not the page
The live index recomputes daily, which is right for a reader and useless for a citation: a yield quoted on a Tuesday need not be the same number the following Monday. So each month is also frozen at its own permanent address and never changes again. The September 2026 edition is the first, and so far the only one; each month after it is frozen at the start of the month that follows.
If a figure is going into an article, a valuation or a board paper, take it from the edition rather than the live page. That URL will still say the same thing when somebody checks it, which is the one thing a citation really needs.
Reusing it
Any figure on the index may be quoted or republished free of charge, including commercially, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The single condition is a credit with a working link. The full table downloads as CSV and as JSON from the live page, and each frozen edition carries its own CSV. All of them apply the same suppression rules as the table on screen, so a thin district comes through blank rather than as a number somebody might trust.
If you need a cut we do not publish — by bedroom count, by project, or one of the districts suppressed for sample size — ask us and we will run it.
Who it is for
Journalists and analysts who want a Phuket figure with its method attached rather than a headline with nothing underneath it. Buyers working out what a district actually asks before they make an offer. Owners setting a price or a rent, and wanting to know where their property sits against the rest of the island. And anyone who has been handed a Phuket yield number with no definition under it.
The index is one view of the same book you can search directly.