Phuket, Chiang Mai, Hua Hin: Resort-Market Asking Prices in 2026

Most writing about Thai property is really writing about Bangkok. That makes sense: Bangkok has the deepest inventory, the most agents, and the most portal activity. But three markets outside the capital, Phuket, Chiang Mai, and Hua Hin with Cha-am, have their own pricing logic, and the listing data shows they behave differently from Bangkok and from each other.

One caveat before any numbers. Everything below is an asking price. Thailand has no public sold-price registry, so the number a seller types into a portal is the only public number that exists, and it is almost always above what a unit eventually trades for. We covered that gap in detail in our piece on asking versus sold prices. Every figure here is a median asking price or median asking rent, from Vurel's nightly read of 1.5 million listings across eleven Thai portals, August 2026.

A second caveat that matters more outside Bangkok: these are zone-wide medians across all residential listings, and resort markets carry a much heavier mix of villas and houses than Bangkok's condo-dominated core. That mix pushes headline medians up, especially in Phuket. Keep it in mind when comparing across zones.

The three markets at a glance

Median asking prices and rents from Vurel's nightly read, August 2026. Chonburi, which includes Pattaya, and Sukhumvit are included for reference.

Zone	Total listings	Median sale ask	Median rent ask (monthly)	Sale ask per sqm
Phuket	27,065	฿14.9M	฿40,000	฿114,610
Chiang Mai	25,285	฿4.5M	฿24,000	฿49,083
Hua Hin - Cha-am	15,263	฿7.0M	฿30,000	฿70,313
Chonburi (incl. Pattaya)	98,144	฿5.65M	฿25,000	฿63,600
Sukhumvit (reference)	278,434	฿8.9M	฿35,000	฿154,286

Totals count listings as posted. Vurel does not merge duplicate listings across portals, so a unit listed on three portals counts three times. That inflates absolute totals everywhere, but it inflates them roughly consistently, so the totals still work for comparing market size and composition.

Three things jump out of this table.

First, Phuket's median sale ask, ฿14.9 million, is higher than any Bangkok zone we track, including Chidlom - Ploenchit at ฿11 million. A resort island has a higher median ask than the most expensive district of the capital.

Second, Phuket's per-sqm ask, around ฿115,000, is well below Sukhumvit's roughly ฿154,000 and nowhere near Chidlom - Ploenchit's roughly ฿194,000. High ticket, moderate per-sqm. The gap between those two facts is the villa mix: Phuket's for-sale inventory skews toward large standalone properties, so the median listing is big and expensive in absolute terms while the price of a square meter stays below prime Bangkok.

Third, Chiang Mai is in a different price universe entirely. A ฿4.5 million median ask and ฿49,000 per sqm put it below every central Bangkok zone and close to outer-ring zones like Nonthaburi and Rangsit on a per-sqm basis, despite being Thailand's second city.

Phuket: a sale market with a premium price tag

Phuket has 27,065 listings in our nightly read, and the composition is the story: 16,645 are for sale against 10,439 for rent. That is a sale-heavy market, roughly 1.6 sale listings for every rental.

Compare that with the center of Bangkok. Chidlom - Ploenchit runs the other way entirely: 8,046 sale listings against 23,285 rentals, roughly three rental listings for every sale. Central Bangkok's portal inventory is dominated by landlords competing for tenants. Phuket's is dominated by owners and developers competing for buyers.

What does that mean in practice? A few things.

For buyers, sale-heavy composition means selection and, usually, negotiating room. Sixteen thousand sale listings on an island is a lot of sellers who all need a buyer, and asking prices in that situation are opening positions, not settled facts. The asking-to-sold gap that practitioners describe for Thailand generally has more room to run when supply is deep.

For anyone reading the ฿14.9 million median as "a Phuket condo costs 15 million baht": it does not. The median is being pulled up by the villa and pool-house segment that dominates Phuket's for-sale inventory. Condo listings exist across a wide band below that number. The per-sqm figure, ฿114,610, is the better mental anchor for apartment-style stock, and even that is a median across mixed property types, so treat it as a zone-level reference rather than a condo price.

For renters, 10,439 rental listings at a ฿40,000 median monthly ask makes Phuket the most expensive rental market in our data outside central Bangkok, tied with Chidlom - Ploenchit's ฿40,000 median. Tourism demand, seasonal lets, and a stock that skews toward larger and furnished properties all feed into that.

Chiang Mai: the cheapest large market in Thailand

Chiang Mai's numbers look nothing like Phuket's. The median sale ask is ฿4.5 million, from Vurel's nightly read, August 2026. Per square meter, the median ask is about ฿49,000. For context, that is roughly a third of Sukhumvit's per-sqm ask and a quarter of Chidlom - Ploenchit's.

The market is meaningfully large: 25,285 total listings, nearly the size of Phuket's pool, split 15,999 for sale and 9,371 for rent. So this is not a thin market where the median is three houses and a noodle shop. It is a deep market that is simply cheap.

The composition is similar to Phuket's, about 1.7 sale listings per rental, but the price level changes what that composition means. In Phuket, sale-heavy plus premium pricing suggests a market of discretionary sellers, second homes, and investment stock. In Chiang Mai, sale-heavy plus a ฿4.5 million median looks more like an ordinary owner-occupier market with a large supply of moderately priced houses and condos, plus a rental segment serving students, remote workers, and retirees at a ฿24,000 median monthly ask.

Chiang Mai is where the "Thailand is expensive now" narrative goes to die. If the reference point is central Bangkok or coastal Phuket, the north is trading at a steep discount per square meter, and that discount shows up consistently across the sale and rental sides of the data.

Hua Hin and Cha-am: four sale listings for every rental

The Hua Hin - Cha-am zone is the smallest of the three, 15,263 total listings, but it has the most extreme composition in our data: 12,169 sale listings against 3,150 rentals. That is nearly four sale listings for every rental listing.

For comparison, from the same nightly read:

Zone	Sale listings	Rent listings	Approx. ratio
Hua Hin - Cha-am	12,169	3,150	3.9 to 1
Chiang Mai	15,999	9,371	1.7 to 1
Phuket	16,645	10,439	1.6 to 1
Chidlom - Ploenchit	8,046	23,285	0.3 to 1

A 4-to-1 sale-to-rent ratio tells you what kind of market this is. Hua Hin is Thailand's retirement and second-home coast, three hours from Bangkok, and the portal inventory reflects it: people list property there to sell it, not to run it as a rental business. The rental market that does exist is small and prices at a ฿30,000 median monthly ask, which is high relative to the zone's ฿7 million median sale ask and likely reflects seasonal and furnished stock rather than a deep long-term rental market.

The median sale ask, ฿7 million from Vurel's August 2026 read, sits between Chiang Mai and Phuket, as does the per-sqm figure of about ฿70,000. Same villa-mix caveat as Phuket: the zone's inventory leans toward houses and pool villas, so the median ticket runs above what typical condo stock asks.

For a buyer, the practical reading of a 4-to-1 market is patience. Twelve thousand sale listings competing for a buyer pool that skews toward unhurried retirees and second-home shoppers is not a seller's market. Asking-price history, which Vurel has tracked since March 2026, matters more here than almost anywhere: a Hua Hin listing that has cut twice and sat for months is a very different negotiation than its asking price suggests.

Rough yield math, shown transparently

With medians for both sale asks and rent asks, you can sketch a gross yield. This is approximate in every direction: the median sale listing and the median rental listing are different properties, both numbers are asking figures rather than agreed prices, and gross yield ignores fees, vacancy, and tax. Treat it as a comparison of market shapes, not a forecast of returns.

The arithmetic is median monthly rent ask times 12, divided by median sale ask:

Zone	Median rent ask x 12	Median sale ask	Approx. gross yield on asks
Chiang Mai	฿288,000	฿4.5M	~6.4%
Hua Hin - Cha-am	฿360,000	฿7.0M	~5.1%
Sukhumvit	฿420,000	฿8.9M	~4.7%
Phuket	฿480,000	฿14.9M	~3.2%

The ordering is more trustworthy than the digits. Chiang Mai's cheap sale stock against a real rental market produces the strongest ratio. Phuket's produces the weakest, because the sale median is inflated by villa stock that the ฿40,000 median rental does not correspond to. If you rebuilt this calculation on matched condo stock, Phuket's number would look different, and that is exactly why the calculation needs to be labeled approximate. Our methodology page covers what the medians do and do not control for.

What resort markets demand from a buyer

The common thread across all three markets is that they are sale-heavy, and sale-heavy markets reward buyers who arrive with data. Concretely:

Use the per-sqm median, not the headline median, as your anchor. In villa-heavy zones the median listing is not the typical condo. A Phuket condo asking around ฿115,000 per sqm is at the zone median; one asking well above that needs a reason.

Check asking-price history before negotiating. Vurel has tracked asking-price changes since March 2026. In slow, deep markets like Hua Hin, a listing's cut history is the closest thing to a public signal of the seller's floor.

Expect duplicate listings. The same villa often appears on several portals, sometimes at different asking prices under different agents. We deliberately do not merge those, because the spread between them is itself information about how the property is being marketed.

Contact posting varies by portal, not by zone. A posted phone or LINE contact appears on more than half of listings overall, about 56 percent, but the share varies widely by portal. In resort markets with heavy agent activity, filtering to listings with posted contacts is a fast way to reach the person who actually controls the property.

---

Vurel reads 2.2 million listings from eleven Thai portals nightly, across every zone in Thailand, not just Bangkok. Zone pages with medians and listing counts are at vurel.io/area, and you can see the data on a live sample before signing up. All figures are asking prices, and we label them that way because that is what they are.