Google Business Profile for real estate agencies in Phuket: a checklist

Your Google Business Profile is what a buyer standing in Bang Tao sees when they type "real estate agency near me" or "condo for sale Bang Tao". Four things decide whether that person calls you: the primary category, the service areas, photos that show real listings and a real office, and a steady flow of reviews from buyers who actually completed a purchase. This checklist covers those four, then the weekly routine that keeps the profile alive in about twenty minutes.

Why the profile often decides the first contact

Two very different people find your agency on Google Maps.

The first is already in Phuket. They are in a rental in Rawai or a hotel in Cherng Talay, they open Maps, they search "real estate agency near me". Distance between that person and your verified address drives much of what they see, so your address and your categories matter more than any clever wording.

The second buys from abroad. CBRE's field surveys for the first half of 2026 note that many foreign buyers purchase in prime locations or in projects with rental programmes "without visiting the site". For that buyer the profile is a trust check: a real office, photos that are not only renders, reviews written by people who went to the Land Office, a phone number someone answers.

The volume is real. Krungsri Research counted 2,548 residential units transferred in Phuket in the first quarter of 2026, up 17.9% year on year, including 420 foreign condo transfers, up 52.2%, worth 2.4 billion THB.

Be honest about the limit. A complete profile will not fix an inquiry nobody answers. No study of Phuket agency response times exists. In the United States, Pied Piper tested 2,198 inquiries to offices of 21 large brands in 2026: 68% of website inquiries got no response within 24 hours, and nearly one in ten online forms did not work (Florida Realtors). Measure your own number instead of guessing: ask a friend to call your profile on a Saturday at 18:00, send the website form too, and write down how long each reply took.

The two settings that matter most: category and service area

Do these before you touch anything else.

1. Go to business.google.com and sign in with the account that owns the profile. If an ex-employee or an old agency owns it, start the ownership transfer today: everything below is wasted on a profile you do not control.
2. Set the primary category to the one thing you mostly do. This single field does more for which searches you appear in than the whole description.
3. Add secondary categories only for services you really deliver. Adding "Villa" or "Apartment building" when you are a brokerage confuses the match and can attract the wrong calls.
4. Decide about the address. If buyers can walk into your office in Phuket Town, Chalong or Cherng Talay, keep the address visible: it is your strongest asset for "near me" searches. If you work from home and only meet buyers at the property, make it a service area business and hide the address, which is what Google's rules require.
5. Add your service areas as districts or sub districts, not as one giant "Phuket" entry. Match them to where you actually sell.
6. Fill the services list with the words a buyer uses: condo for sale, villa for sale, long term rental, off plan purchase, rental management, resale.
7. Set opening hours you really keep, including Saturday, and add special hours for Songkran and the Chinese New Year week.

Google changes the category list, so pick from what the picker offers rather than from this table, and check the wording once a quarter in the Business Profile help pages.

Which areas to list? Follow your own sales, then your market. Knight Frank's year end 2025 report puts Bang Tao at 32.7% of Phuket condo units sold in 2025, Karon at 17.9% and Kamala at 9.4%, while villa sales concentrated in Cherng Talay (19.9%), Pa Khlok (13.9%) and Bang Jo (13.4%). Service areas tell Google where you deliver. They do not move you up in a district far from your office, so do not expect a Phuket Town address to win Kamala searches on its own.

Photos: the office, the team, and the listings you really sell

Photos rarely change your position. They change whether the person taps your number instead of the agency below you.

Shoot this set once, then add to it:

1. The exterior with your sign, taken from the road a buyer arrives on, so they recognise the building.
2. Reception and the meeting table where you present listings.
3. Your team, faces visible, no stock images. Buyers from Russia, China and Europe are checking that you exist.
4. Three to five photos per listing type you sell: a sea view condo, a pool villa, a townhouse, a long term rental.
5. One photo of a signing or a handover at the Land Office, with the buyer's written permission and no document visible.
6. A short vertical video, under 30 seconds, walking through one unit.

Remove photos of projects you no longer represent and any image with a price written on it: prices date fast, and a stale price is the first thing a buyer will question. Upload two or three new photos every week rather than fifty once a year.

Reviews from buyers, inside Google's rules

Reviews are the hardest part and the one competitors cannot copy. Note that replying is expected: BrightLocal's 2025 consumer survey found that 89% of consumers expect businesses to respond to reviews (via Searchlab).

What you may do:

1. Ask every completed buyer and every tenant whose lease you signed, in person, on the day it goes well. The day of transfer at the Land Office is the natural moment.
2. Send the review link from your profile straight after, in the buyer's language, in the same WhatsApp or LINE thread you already use.
3. Ask your sellers and landlords too. They are clients as well, and their reviews describe a different strength.
4. Reply to every review within a few days, in the language it was written in, with two or three sentences. No buyer name, no unit number, no price: Thailand's PDPA protects personal data, and anything beyond a general rule is a question for a Thai lawyer.

What you may not do, because Google's policies forbid it and the reviews can be removed: buying reviews, asking only the happy clients while filtering the others, offering a discount or a gift in exchange, or posting from staff accounts.

A review average can also move fast in the wrong direction. A Phuket restaurant fell from 4.9 to 3.1 after a wave of one star reviews, and a British man was later arrested on defamation charges (Khaosod English). The practical defence is a steady flow of genuine reviews, so no single bad week defines you. The legal route is for a lawyer.

Languages, the call button and where the inquiry lands

Krungsri Research names Russians, Chinese, French, British and Americans as the largest groups of foreign buyers in Phuket in 2025, and The Thaiger reports that Russian buyers account for 44% of the island's foreign condo transfer value (The Thaiger).

The profile description is a single text, so use it to say plainly which languages your team works in, for example English, Thai, Russian and French. Then put the translated detail where it can live properly: separate pages on your site, linked from the profile.

Google removed chat from Business Profiles, so the buttons that remain are call, website and directions. That makes the website link a decision, not a formality. Point it at a page with the WhatsApp and LINE buttons a Phuket buyer expects: Thailand has 56 million LINE users (DataReportal), and business use of WhatsApp in Thailand grew 208% in 2024 (The Nation). If most of your buyers are Russian, read how Russian buyers find property in Phuket before you choose that landing page.

AI answers are becoming a first step rather than a last one. In the United States, the National Association of Realtors reports that 20% of prospective buyers and homeowners have used AI tools or chatbots for homebuying research (NAR), and Google says its AI Mode passed one billion monthly active users by July 2026 (Alphabet Q2 2026 remarks). A clean, consistent profile is what those systems read about you, in whatever language the buyer asks.

The weekly routine, about twenty minutes

In the Q&A tab you may post and answer your own questions. Use the ones your sales team repeats all day: Do you work with leasehold? Can a foreigner buy in this building? Do you handle rental management? Keep each answer short and factual.

A worked example with round, hypothetical numbers: on a 6,000,000 THB condo, at the 5% that RE/MAX Thailand's own guide describes as the market standard in tourist areas including Phuket (rates are not set by law, and the seller almost always pays at transfer), the gross commission is 300,000 THB. One extra closed deal a year covers a great many twenty minute Mondays. That is the whole business case: no ranking promise, just an asset you own.

If you want the ranking mechanics behind the profile, see how to rank on Google Maps in Phuket.

What to do this week

Fix the three things that cannot wait: confirm you own the profile, set the correct primary category, and list the districts you actually sell in, with the address visible if buyers can visit your office. Then book twenty minutes next Monday and run the routine above. Notorioos offers a free Visibility Check that shows where the agency appears on Google Maps and in AI answers in five languages.