Green building governance and sustainability disclosure in Thailand's listed property sector: a visibility-based assessment

Purpose This study examines how green building governance becomes visible through corporate sustainability disclosure in Thailand's listed property sector. It investigates whether regulatory (building energy code, BEC), certification (Thai's Rating of Energy and Environmental Sustainability, TREES and international schemes) and environmental, social and governance (ESG)-related disclosure signals are reflected consistently in investor-facing corporate reporting between 2018 and 2025. Design/methodology/approach Using manually coded, inter-coder-validated data from 33 listed Thai property firms (264 firm-year observations, 2018–2025; Cohen's kappa = 0.98), a sustainability reporting visibility score was constructed and its temporal trend tested using panel-appropriate inferential statistics (Friedman test, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Cochran's Q test, panel regression and generalised estimating equations), with robustness assessed via principal component analysis and leave-one-indicator-out sensitivity analysis. Findings Visible sustainability disclosure increased significantly over the study period, but growth was concentrated in ESG- and carbon-related disclosure rather than in explicit references to mandatory building-energy compliance or domestic green building certification. A small subset of firms exhibited integrated, multidimensional disclosure, while most firms remained disclosure-led with limited certification or regulatory visibility. Originality/value This is among the first studies to combine a manually coded, inter-coder-validated disclosure index with panel-appropriate inferential statistics to assess green building governance disclosure in an emerging-market listed property sector, offering a replicable framework for sustainability accounting and disclosure research in comparable contexts.