Chiang Mai Is Left With 11,353 Unsold Homes While Chiang Rai Needs 96 Months to Clear

Northern Thailand's unsold housing stock keeps growing, with Chiang Mai holding 11,353 units and Chiang Rai needing 96 months to absorb what is already built.

Thailand's Real Estate Information Center published its survey of the northern residential market for the first half of 2026 on 25 September 2026, covering Chiang Mai, Lamphun, Chiang Rai, Phitsanulok and Nakhon Sawan. Chiang Mai, the region's largest market, carried 12,715 units for sale worth 60,091 million baht, up 12.7% by units and 16.3% by value on a year earlier, and 11,353 of those units were still unsold, 12.0% more than a year before.

The centre's own reading is that the region is moving into a rebalancing phase, shifting from expansion towards turning existing stock into cash. New project launches across the five provinces fell by about 9%.

The absorption arithmetic differs by a factor of almost four

The clearest way to compare these five markets is the time each needs to sell what it has already built. Chiang Mai absorbs 1.8% of its stock a month, which works out at about 50 months, and the split inside that is instructive: condominiums clear in 39 months and low-rise houses in 55. Lamphun is the fastest at 3.1% a month and 26 months, on a much smaller base of 979 units for sale worth 2,550 million baht, with 795 unsold.

At the other end, Chiang Rai absorbs 1.0% a month and needs 96 months, eight years, to clear 2,843 unsold units out of 3,020 for sale worth 11,772 million baht. Nakhon Sawan sits at 1.3% a month and 69 months, with 1,239 unsold out of 1,347 for sale worth 6,858 million baht.

Developers have already stopped building in two provinces

The supply response is visible and unusually blunt. Nakhon Sawan saw zero new projects launched in the half, and its total stock for sale fell 22.6% while new sales dropped 77.0%. Lamphun cut new supply by 73.0% and its stock for sale fell 17.7%, which is how a 26-month absorption period gets built. Chiang Rai added just 68 new units, 43.3% fewer than a year earlier.

Phitsanulok is the sharpest example of the same mechanism. New supply there fell 91.4% while new sales rose 61.4%, and the absorption period shortened from 119 months to 78. Nothing about that improvement came from stronger demand alone. It came from developers stopping.

What we deliberately left out

One block of figures in this release is not in this article. The press release carries a new-sales value of 5,790 million baht with percentage changes attached, and two separate readings of the document disagreed on whether those belong to Chiang Mai alone or to the five provinces together. A number whose geographic level is uncertain is worse than no number, because a provincial figure presented as a regional one silently misstates the size of the market. It stays out until the level is settled.

How this sits against our own Chiang Mai numbers

On the Glopra data a one-bedroom condominium in Chiang Mai is asking 2,523,950 baht, or 76,333 USD, against an asking rent of 14,524 baht a month, or 439.26 USD. Both come from the same portal, the same city and the same one-bedroom condominium segment, which is what makes the ratio usable, and it produces a gross yield of about 6.9% before costs. We rate that row Low confidence, and the reason matters here: both sides are live listing aggregates from a property portal rather than transaction records, and listings are what sellers hope for, not what buyers paid.

Read the two sources together and the yield stops looking like good news on its own. A market with 39 months of unsold condominium stock is not a market where asking rents are being bid up. A 6.9% asking yield in that setting is far more likely to reflect prices that have stopped rising than rents that are racing ahead, and the 12.0% increase in unsold Chiang Mai units points the same way.

For the country as a whole we publish a per-unit price of 77,534.50 USD, built from this same centre's national ownership-transfer data for the first half of 2026, which recorded 167,665 units and 429,839 million baht of transfer value. We publish no national Thai rent, so there is no national yield. Thai residential prices moved 1.26% over twelve months in baht and minus 2.9% measured in dollars, with 12.0% over five years and 29.1% over ten, and we score the country 62 for bubble risk, in the elevated band. The Chiang Mai row is a city row and the Thai row is a country row, and the two are different geographic levels that cannot be ranked against one another.

The ownership question comes first for a foreign buyer

Before any of this arithmetic matters, a non-resident in Thailand can own a condominium outright but only within a 49% foreign quota per building, and cannot own land. Buying costs run to 7.5% of the price and rental income carries an effective 3.37% in our standardised non-resident case, inside a 0.86% to 15% range. An eight-year absorption period in Chiang Rai and a 49% building quota in Chiang Mai are two different kinds of constraint, and only one of them shows up in a yield calculation.

Sources: Real Estate Information Center (REIC), Government Housing Bank of Thailand, press release No. 294 on the northern region residential market in the first half of 2026, 25 September 2026 https://www.reic.or.th/Activities/PressRelease/294; Real Estate Information Center (REIC), northern housing market first half 2026 press release PDF https://www.reic.or.th/Upload/2026-09-25-reic-press-release-northern-housing-market-h1_365_1790333283_13363.pdf

Market data: Thailand · Phuket · Chiang Mai · Pattaya