Buying and selling a scooter in Thailand

In this article we will tell you about our experience of buying and selling a scooter, transferring the Green Book, finding a seller and a buyer, and everything else that goes with it.

Originally, when planning our trip, we wanted to buy a scooter or a motorcycle in India and ride it through every possible country of South and Southeast Asia, but little by little we gave up on the idea, realizing that it would be rather difficult and unsafe.

First, given the size of India, the quality of its roads, and the mentality of Indian drivers; and second, the question of crossing the Myanmar border on an Indian motorbike (which, by the way, you cannot register as your own property) never got a clear answer. So we postponed buying a scooter until Thailand, on the island of Phuket.

Buying a scooter in Thailand

As soon as we arrived in Phuket, we quickly rented a beat-up scooter for 150 baht a day and started looking for our future two-wheeled friend. We were looking for a reliable used one and found a 2012 Honda Click 125i scooter with 7,000 km on it for 32,000 baht. In excellent condition. We bought it at the Joe Motorbikes shop in Phuket Town, not far from Tesco.

To buy a scooter (just as for getting a driver's license), a tourist needs to get a Certificate of Residence at any immigration office for 300–500 baht.

The procedure of buying a scooter in Thailand itself is very simple — you give the seller the money, your certificate of residence, and your passport, take the bike right away, and a week later you get the transferred Green Book — the vehicle registration book with the new owner written in, that is, you. Transferring the Green Book costs about 1000 baht. Joe covered the payment. You will also need to keep this cost in mind when selling the scooter and agree in advance who will pay for the transfer.

That's it — now you are the legal owner of a Thai scooter. As the next step, since we had a long journey ahead, we went to Koh Samui and got Thai motorcycle driver's licenses there.

Here are a few photos of our scooter:

Selling a scooter in Thailand

Selling a scooter in Thailand is the exact reverse process — you have to become the seller and find a buyer. We posted an ad for the scooter on bahtsold.com, and the calls started pouring in right away. Everyone called — both Europeans and Thais. If speaking English is a problem for you, move your conversations to SMS and set up a meeting. In the end we sold the scooter for 26,000 baht. That is, 6 thousand less than we paid for it. We used it for half a year and put about 18,000 km on it in total. I think it worked out to be a pretty good deal — about 1000 baht a month, considering that the cheapest scooter rental costs 3000 baht a month.

In the end, the buyer turned out to be a Thai traffic police officer. We agreed that we would sell the bike on the last day of our stay in Phuket, that is, in about a week, and that he would pay for the transfer (~1000 baht). On the day of the sale we rode up with all our things to the traffic police office in Phuket Town. The transfer went very quickly — the Thai man used his position, and everything was done in 10 minutes without waiting in line. After that we rode together with the Thai man to the bus station, handed over the bike, and a couple of hours later left for Bangkok. It turned out quick, convenient, and profitable.

The Department of Transport office (the traffic police) in Phuket is located here:

And here is the video we made from our scooter trip through the countries of Southeast Asia: