Sport Is No Longer Just an Amenity in Bangkok Real Estate

The growth of sport and active lifestyle in Thailand has been well documented in consumer trend reports over the past several years. What has received less attention is how consistently that trend is now showing up in real estate decisions across Bangkok.

Sport is being incorporated to support residential and commercial developments, and new standalone facilities are being developed throughout the city as a new income-generating asset class. Each reflects a different commercial rationale, but the direction is the same: sport in Bangkok real estate has moved from amenity to strategy.

The Demand Behind the Trend

The underlying demand data supports this shift. The number of registered sport businesses in Thailand grew from approximately 2,078 in 2022 to 2,766 in 2025, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 10%. That growth has been driven not by competitive athletes but by a much broader demographic: families, young professionals and communities across different age groups incorporating regular sport and wellness activity into their daily routines.

Three sports in particular have seen exceptional growth in urban Bangkok: tennis, pickleball and padel. All three share characteristics that make them well-suited to the Bangkok urban context: they are social sports, played in pairs or small groups, accessible to a wide age range and manageable in compact court formats that fit within mixed-use developments and residential projects. The court infrastructure they require is a natural fit for underutilized rooftop and podium space that developers were previously treating as an afterthought.

Beyond the sports themselves, the behavioral shift matters. Consumers are spending more on sport, wellness and active leisure experiences as a share of their overall expenditure. National policies and government initiatives have supported sports participation. And operators, both local and international, are actively investing in new facilities to meet demand that continues to outpace supply in certain formats and locations.

How Residential Developers Are Responding

For residential developers, sport facilities have become one of the more effective tools for differentiating a project in a competitive market. The logic is straightforward: a well-designed sport facility creates a reason for residents to gather, which strengthens community cohesion, which in turn supports the lifestyle positioning that buyers in the mid-to-upper market are increasingly willing to pay for.

Several projects in the Bangkok market illustrate how this is being executed. Grand Bangkok Boulevard by SC Asset incorporated a pickleball court as part of its community amenity offering. Crystal Sport and Crystal Sport G by KE Group took a more integrated approach, with international-standard tennis courts (built to US Open specifications) as a central feature of the development. S Quarter by Sansiri reflects a similar approach, using sport as a defining characteristic of the community rather than an add-on.

What these projects share is a recognition that sport facilities, when designed as genuine community destinations rather than box-ticking amenities, generate a different kind of resident engagement. Whether that translates into a measurable pricing premium is difficult to quantify given the range of variables involved, but the pattern across multiple projects in different submarkets suggests developers believe the impact is real. 

Sport as a Footfall and Dwell-Time Driver in Commercial Real Estate

In mixed-use and commercial real estate, sport facilities are serving a different purpose: driving footfall, dwell time and repeat visits in ways that other amenity types typically don't.

AIA Connect incorporated a pickleball court as part of its workplace offer, reflecting the growing expectation among office occupiers that sport and wellness infrastructure should be part of the employee experience, not a separate off-site commitment. True Digital Park's 101 Sky Track—an elevated running track integrated into the Phase 2 development—takes this further, creating an amenity that generates regular daily activation across the broader campus.

Cloud 11 is another example of a mixed-use development in Bangkok, combining health, fitness and active lifestyle programming with retail and F&B in a format designed specifically around the active lifestyle consumer.

Not every commercial application requires this level of investment. Incorporating a sport component into an existing building—a court, a track, a fitness corner—can be done at a fraction of the capital cost of a dedicated facility, with the goal simply of sharpening a building's appeal and drawing more visitors through the door.

The commercial logic is that sport and wellness facilities attract health-conscious, higher-spending customers with strong repeat visit habits—a profile that performs well for adjacent F&B and retail tenants. The facility itself may or may not generate significant direct revenue; its primary value is in who it brings in and how often they come back.

Standalone Sport Facilities as an Emerging Asset Class

Beyond their role within residential and commercial developments, standalone sport facilities are emerging as a new income-generating asset class in their own right. These projects treat the sport facility itself as the primary use, typically developed by general real estate investors rather than residential specialists, and serving the residential communities and office populations of an urban neighborhood rather than a single development.

Beat Discovery by Bhiraj Group in Sukhumvit, Sterling Sport and Wellness on Sukhumvit 24, and Arena Sport Club at Bang Yai by Proud Real Estate represent different expressions of this model. They vary in format, scale and positioning, but share a common commercial structure: revenue diversified across court rental, coaching programs, memberships, events, wellness services and F&B, generating recurring income streams that reduce dependence on any single revenue line.

Eden Country Club by Eden Estate fits the standalone category in a different way: rather than an open facility serving the wider neighborhood, it plans to operate as a private members' club integrating sport, health and leisure across generations, when it opens in 2028. The membership model sets it apart from the pay-per-use structure that defines most standalone operators.

This diversification is what separates the stronger operators from those that rely primarily on court rental fees. A sport club generating income from a coaching academy, a membership base, regular events and an integrated F&B offer has a much more stable revenue base than one that charges by the hour and competes on court availability alone.

The model works in Bangkok's urban locations because the demand is there: higher-income residents within walking distance, a significant office population generating daytime and after-work demand, and a customer base willing to pay for a well-run, well-located sport experience. 

A few observations follow from the pattern across all three development types. Quality of execution matters more than presence of a facility. A pickleball court installed as a marketing feature without programming or management will not generate the community activity that justifies its inclusion. The projects doing this well are treating sport facilities as managed destinations—with a calendar of programming that gives residents, visitors or members a reason to come back regularly. Sport works best when it is genuinely integrated into the surrounding development (feeding dwell time, F&B spending and a sense of community) rather than sitting alongside it as a separate offering.

For standalone facilities, revenue mix matters more than court occupancy. Court rental is a commodity with limited pricing power; the operators with the stronger businesses are those who have built memberships, coaching programs and F&B into the model from the start.

Location also remains as important for sport facilities as it is for any other hospitality or retail asset. A well-run club in a location with insufficient population density of the right demographic will underperform regardless of quality. The best-performing locations combine high-income residential density with a significant office catchment that generates consistent demand across the day.

The active lifestyle shift in Thailand is not a passing trend. It reflects changes in how people spend their time and money that have been building across demographic groups for several years, with the underlying market—evidenced by the near 10% annual growth in registered sport businesses—showing no sign of slowing. Bangkok is where this shift is most visible today, but the same pattern is starting to appear in other Thai cities and tourist destinations, Phuket among them, wherever similar demand fundamentals are in place. Developers and investors who treat sport as a serious design and programming consideration are better placed to capture the value this shift is creating than those who treat it as a checkbox in the amenities brief.

CBRE Thailand's Consulting & Research team advises developers and investors across residential, mixed-use, commercial and hospitality asset classes on market positioning, feasibility and strategic planning. For further information on how sport and lifestyle trends are influencing real estate strategy in Bangkok and across Thailand, please contact our team.

 
This article is written by By Nicholas Vettewinkel, Senior Director, Thailand — CBRE Consulting & Research.


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