Commercially Visible, Statistically Invisible: Digital Real Estate Marketing as Migration Infrastructure in the Myanmar–Thailand Corridor

Following the 2021 military coup and subsequent economic collapse in Myanmar, conflict-driven migration has catalysed a distinct transnational real estate phenomenon. This study examines how property developers and agents in Thailand's key destination cities — Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Pattaya — have adapted digital marketing to target Myanmar nationals seeking to preserve wealth and relocate across borders. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of 140 publicly available digital marketing artifacts collected from Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube between February and May 2026, the study reads these materials through the combined lens of migration-infrastructure theory, Push–Pull migration theory, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the Elaboration Likelihood Model, and the 7Ps marketing mix. Rather than investigating buyer behaviour directly, the analysis infers from marketers' constructions how an audience of crisis-driven investors is segmented and addressed. The findings show that digital real estate marketing functions as a form of migration infrastructure: advertisements bundle long-stay visa facilitation, freehold and foreign-quota ownership, localized pricing, one-stop documentation, and family-relocation narratives into a single relocation product, blurring the boundary between condominium purchase and residency eligibility even where Thai law grants no such direct pathway. Marketers integrate rational, information-driven appeals with emotional and status-based reassurance, and do so through a strategic silence in which none of the artifacts names the coup, the conflict, or the economic collapse even as every message is engineered around their consequences. The study's central contribution is to identify a recognition asymmetry within migration infrastructure: its commercial dimension identifies and segments an affluent, professional migration stream that regulatory and humanitarian frameworks do not capture — a population rendered commercially visible yet statistically invisible, and addressed as such while the underlying crisis is never named.

Migration infrastructure, Real estate marketing, Qualitative content analysis, Transnational property investment, and Crisis-driven consumer behaviour

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