Prices of property in Phuket have risen by roughly three times in the last ten years. That's not a typo. A property that fetched at 15 million baht as a seaside villa is now going for 45 million. And buyers keep lining up stormphuket.com/.What's behind this surge? A few things. Tourism didn't vanish in this country — it experienced a pandemic pause and bounced back hard. Demand in the long-term to rent by digital nomads shot up from 2021 onward. And the island's geography does the work at no cost: you can only go so far before you've run into jungle, hills, or coastline.Phuket is not a single market. Multiple micro-markets are packed onto one island, and lumping them together is how investors lose money.Patong? High density, night scene, short-stay rental powerhouse. It is loud, chaotic, and capital growth tends to lag behind. Rawai and Nai Harn attract a distinct type of resident: expat retirees, families, people who've realized that paradise need not include neon lamps. Bang Tao and Laguna command Bang Tao and Laguna due to golf, beach clubs, and restaurants where the wine list is longer than the menu.A friend of mine purchased a 2-bedroom condo in the area of Kata Beach for just under 4 million baht. He took it on a short term basis, earned around 150,000 baht in high season alone, and sold it in 2023 at 5.8 million. He's not a property genius. He just chose the right area, worked with a reliable manager, and did not panic with the COVID.Laws in foreign ownership are here infamously vexing. Non-Thais cannot own land outright — Thai law does not allow foreigners to own more than 49 percent of the total floor area in any one building as condos. The piece you are playing in is condos, and this implies good title deeds and legal ownership. Villas are more complicated — leases of 30 years, often renewable, are the workaround of long-term, but this is not ownership. Know what you're signing.The leasehold/freehold issue never wears out its welcome at expat dinner tables. Western buyers are terrified by leasehold since they have been accustomed to fee-simple ownership. However, a well-structured 30+30+30 year lease in Phuket backed by legal documentation is often robust. The devil is always in the fine print. Get a local property lawyer — not the attorneys of the developer, yours.Developer projects have gone on a rampage all over the island. Some are outstanding. Others are romanticized brochures with impressions of artists and loose dates of completion. Off-plan pricing is attractive — usually 15-25% below completion prices — but off-plan purchases are a real gamble. Look at the track record of the developer, his/her completed projects, and whether they've ever left a project unfinished. It happens.Rental returns should be looked into fairly. Brochures love to making out numbers such as 8 to 10% guaranteed yields. Guaranteed by whom, exactly? The peak season in Phuket lasts around November till April. Low-season occupancy can drop sharply. A real-world net yield on management fees and maintenance and vacancy would be between 5-7 percent on a well-located condo. Still decent. But not magic money.The biggest change is who's buying. In some segments, Russian buyers were taking up too long a time — Surin Beach had a whole slang name on account of it. Post-2022 sanctions changed that somewhat. Chinese buyers that withdrew during COVID have begun to return. The number of Middle Eastern, Australian and Scandinavian buyers are entering the market. The market is diversifying, and this is likely to make it more robust.The island's infrastructure is slowly catching up. The Phuket Town to airport Light Rail Transit project has been long overdue to an extent that it has become a joke. But the roads have improved beyond five years ago. Phuket Town itself is experiencing a real renaissance — old shophouses are being transformed into boutique hotels and coffee shops, drawing in a type of client that ten years ago would have ignored the old quarter entirely.Long term, the island is not going to disappear. The attraction has been: beaches, food, weather, an affordable lifestyle versus Europe — and that's a powerful magnet. The question every buyer faces is whether they is buying at a fair price, in the right location, with the legality of ownership that he or she actually knows. Nail those three and Phuket real estate still delivers.