About Samui Stay

A rental site built backwards from one question: what would make you trust a home you found from 8,000 km away?

Long term rental homes and residential streets of Koh Samui Thailand

The problem we started from

Renting a home long term on this island has a well-known failure mode, and it does not happen at search or at signing. It happens at move-out, when a landlord invents a repair bill and there is nothing to compare it against. Ask anyone who has rented here informally and they either have that story or know someone who does.

The rest of the market grew from there: listings found in Facebook groups, deposits handed over as cash, contracts unwritten and unfiled. Every part of it asks a newcomer to trust strangers quickly, from far away, with the largest sums they will hand over all year.

Samui Stay exists to remove that bet. We did not start with what a rental site usually looks like; we started with what has to be true for a stranger to commit money confidently, then built the inventory, the paperwork and the payment flow around it.

What we actually do differently

Four practices, each checkable rather than aspirational:

Small property rental office on Koh Samui with a team working at desks

Inventory aggregated across multiple partners

No single agency's shelf. Listings are aggregated across multiple property partners onto one island-wide index of 1,986 homes, so you compare the whole market instead of whoever answered the phone first.

Repair costs checked against benchmarks

Every deposit deduction at move-out is checked against a benchmark table of standard repair prices for this market. The same fix costs the same everywhere, which is exactly what informal rentals cannot promise.

Digital contracts, signed and stored

Leases are signed digitally by both parties and kept in your account for the whole tenancy, alongside your identity verification and the move-in condition report.

Documentation required before listing

Partner properties are documented before they are listed: photographs, condition details and the ownership papers a legitimate let requires. A listing without its documentation does not go live.

The size of the inventory behind it

These are audited figures from our full live read on 23 August 2026, not rounded marketing numbers: 1,986 homes across all 17 districts of the island, documented with 30,735 photographs. The median rent across the whole inventory sits at 55,000 THB a month, and every figure quoted anywhere on this site traces back to that read.