Darrel

Just got back from what use to be the land of smiles , We went to Pattaya for a few days, the wife and i after a few stressfully days .She is under the same impression as myself. Pattaya is no fun anymore.

Just wondering when exactly you were here? The town became extremely quiet about 10-15 days ago, due to the run up to Songkran I think. Prior to that it was still quite busy. Not sure what will happen next week.

But that aside, yes Pattaya is now largely peopled by rather dull and/or ill-behaved families, Russians and drunks (some are all three at the same time ).

The good old-fashioned sex tourists are now in the minority, which is a shame as at least they provided some amusement, some decent incomes for Thai workers and generally behaved themselves in public. Today's farangs (visitors and residents) mostly do not: they are a dull lot indeed.

And I don't know why so many (sex) tourists have left.

Perhaps because prices are high, quality is low and (above all) the 'hospitality workers' of all types and genders now mostly seem to have an average age of about 40 and look like the back end of a tuk-tuk. I'm not kidding: even I look prettier and younger than many of the ones I've seen whilst walking around over the last few months. I'm probably cheaper and have a better attitude to work, too.

Thankfully I'm not a customer of theirs and so am not very concerned by the apparent drop in quality.

The rain only lasted an hour or so and the loonies/drunks will be back on the streets within minutes now.

I'm just counting the hours till tonight when the nonsense will be over for another year. I bought a couple of 20B over-rice meals from the woman on the corner at 8 this morning, and I have a couple of beers in the fridge so I dont need to leave my place at all today.

"Visiting Thailand as retired person aged 50 years and over

Evidence required: Copy of bank statement showing income of minimum £900.00 per month.

So for people like me over 50 I see no problem........"

No problem if you happen to have an income. Personally I'm not bothered by this as I'm already here, already have my visa obtained from Birmingham just a few months ago (for which I provided no documentation at all), and will have an extension issued here based on having 800kB in the bank.

But if I was applying now in the UK for a visa I wouldnt get it because although I have a lot of money in the bank I dont receive any sort of regular income. This is rather silly, given the amount of money I have. I suspect that many other people would also be in my position.

Also rather silly in that the UK state pension (which is a suitable qualification for a visa) is only half of the GBP900/month required for people over 50 who dont receive a pension.

You seem to forget that Thais also very easily bend/ignore the law when it suits them and allowing foreigners to own a single family house/land in resort areas of the country is definitely in their interest.

If that were the case then why not just change the law?

Also, I think this corporate structure is more of a Pattaya/Chonburi thing as you never see this form of ownership touted much in other resort areas of the country. Usually, it's the more legal 30 years leasehold.

Well, the original thread title was specifically about house prices here and of course with leasehold the question wouldnt apply in the same way.

That said, I have never quite understood why they dont just change the lease laws to allow for 75 or 100 year leases outright, which would satisfy just about everyone and neatly sidestep the company name nonsense. 30 years on a lease is not quite enough for the average buyer, I think.

For all that...you would have to add...no Thais too

I very nearly did. But Thais over 50 should be OK.

i would first suggest taking a place for about 6 months

Good advice, and something that I had already decided to do wherever I go.

Just off 2nd Rd.

I live on 2nd Road near Central and I have stayed completely dry so far. I do this by making sure that I am home by midday, and then not going out on the streets until after 7pm.

Tomorrow may be a little trickier but at least it is the last day.

Just because people pay more rent does not guarantee a better kind of person .Many pensioners from the UK for example can not pay more than B10,000 a month but are decent people and are not likely to wreck your Condo ,or cause annoyance to others in the building .

Indeed.

There is so much scope here for secure farang retirement villages with no one under 50, no dogs, no bars, no outdoor music, no Songkran riots, some nice garden areas. I would move in like a shot. Cant imagine why no one has launched one.

When you can rent a 3 bed, 2 bath house just over Sukhumvit for less than 15k a month, why on earth would you buy one at a massive 3.5m plus ?

Indeed. Not forgetting maintenance costs which, for a house at least, may be quite high a few years down the line. I've seen a few well-built houses here but I've seen a lot more that look more like garden sheds than houses.

When you can rent a 3 bed, 2 bath house just over Sukhumvit for less than 15k a month, why on earth would you buy one at a massive 3.5m plus ?

Indeed. Not forgetting maintenance costs which, for a house at least, may be quite high a few years down the line. I've seen a few well-built houses here but I've seen a lot more that look more like garden sheds than houses.

"On the estate that i live(rent) houses were selling at 5/8 million and many are still empty 6 years on ,on a friends estate they were 15 million up and again half were empty ,someone i know just purchased one for 8 million ,for cash"

What concerns me is the large number of houses that have been bought in company name. To my mind this is a bomb just waiting to go off, or perhaps a dud firecracker just waiting to fizzle out completely. The same applies to condos also, of course, but at least there may be some potential for these to be sold to Thais for rental purposes if at some future time the government acts to curb company ownership abuse, especially if these condos are in popular areas (near the beach).

I am convinced that at some point some sort of action will be taken. Thais do not like the idea of foreigners owing property. We are here to pay rent.

I think that nearly all property in and around Pattaya is overpriced. Anything that has been up for sale for years on end without finding a buyer must be overpriced. From time to time you will find a house or condo that is on sale (or even sold) at a reasonable price, though this reasonable price will probably have other owners crying "fire sale" or "absurd discount". (And of course from time to time you will get someone who just got off the banana boat paying something near the usual inflated asking price for resale property.)

My Condo in Park Lane Jomtien ( 1 seperate bedroom ) ,36 sqm cost B1.2 m .A similar Condo in Chiang Mai would cost at least the same if not more .

Would that not be because there just arent very many small cheap condos of that type in CM, whereas Pattaya is full of them? You could get a unit a little larger than that in VT1 or VT2 for the same price or perhaps .1 or .2MB more, and it would be a very short walk from the beach and the bahtbuses and the shops/bars. OK, it probably wouldnt have a seperate bedroom as small rooms werent popular when those buildings were built. You could always make a bedroom, of course.

I have been looking quite closely at CM prices (I am becoming more and more inclined to live there rather than here) and it seems to me that asking prices there are lower than here, at least for the sort of places I fancy.

Quite how the asking prices translate into selling prices, I dont know. Asking prices for rentals there are also lower than here by about 30% it seems, but again I'm not sure how that translates into final agreed prices (I doubt I would ever actually pay the asking price for a Pattaya rental).

Are you sure you have a full service UK broker or just an ETF specialist ? none of this stuff is that complicated to trade, in any event ,sounds like you may need a new UK broker,

My broker definitely does all stocks and shares, including all major foreign markets, and also ETFs and various other bits and pieces. However they are execution only and whilst they do have a large "research" section online, if you dont know the code/name of the security you cant really research it. Much of it just redirects to another site anyway, where they have some sort of corporate login arrangement. (Can't say that I enjoy looking at this sort of information though: I would rather look at the innards of a PC anyday. Far more logical and orderly.)

I was just thinking that there may be some other online (UK) broker that specialises in that sort of trading, and so maybe makes the information more readily available.

I will study those other links (as soon I can work up some enthusiasm for the subject!). Thanks.

... they bought the condo at the Thai price and then discovered, to their horror,........... they had paid MORE than the farang price.

Which just goes to show that people selling property in Thailand will shaft Thais just as soundly as they will shaft farangs, given half a chance.

Moral: if you assume that everyone selling property in Thailand is totally dishonest you will never be disappointed.

I have some questions.

I would like to know where to find the sort of information included in the Bloomberg screen grab without actually subscribing to such a service? I've hunted around but cant find very much at all. And the little I have found often seems to read like a Bangkok boiler shop press release. (Buy these Greek bonds now because it will triple in value within x months/weeks/days/hours. Yeah, where do I sign?) I dont do enough buying and selling to warrant having a paid subscription to Bloomberg etc., and surely never will.

Also, having decided which bonds to buy (for me that would surely be Euro denominated bonds issued by pretty secure entities such as the German or French central banks, or some very big banks/companies, and probably some GBP bonds of similar standing) where to actually buy them? My big UK broker doesnt seem to do these, though it does do ETFs based on these sorts of bonds. Or maybe I just dont know the right code to tap in (see question one).

I'm only interested in the most secure bonds as I dont need to increase the capital I have, just to keep it safe and get a decent return (ie any positive return after inflation ).

TIA

I suspect that the OP wants a printed bank statement showing his address in Thailand, which he will use as proof of residential address for some other bank or organisation outside Thailand.

I am in the same position. One of my banks outside Thailand wants one of

Bank, building society or credit card statement

Utility bill (e.g. gas, electricity, fixed-line phone but not mobile phone bills)

Correspondence from a government agency

Pension/benefit statements

Mortgage statement

Full or provisional driving licence# bearing address details

none of which I can provide. (They will specifically not accept documents printed from webpages ie online statements.)

I suspect that I will have to get some sort of document from Jomtien Immigration.

Other banks were much more reasonable and only wanted written confirmation (by me) of my Thai address.

My address with Kbank is in English.

Online banking is definitely the easiest way to check.

I did a SWIFT transfer from the UK a few weeks ago. It took about 12 hours to hit my Kbank account, and I suspect that most of that was due to it being overnight. An incoming transfer from Europe to the same UK bank took over 3 weeks because they lost it.

Wandering around 2nd Rd and Soi Buakow over the last couple of evenings (I dont go out until well after 7pm during Songkran, for obvious reasons) I noticed that nearly all the people still playing with water were bar staff or massage parlour staff, and some drunken motorbike taxi drivers, with only a couple of drunk farangs. The total number of people playing with water was only about 10 or 20 in the entire area I walked through.

I suspect there were still quite a lot on Beach Road, but of course I haven't been there since last week.

Only 2.5 days left, thankfully. Only going out after dark is starting to make me feel like a

They're cheap but you get what you pay for.

They aren't even cheap. By the time you have added on all the "optional' extras they are very expensive. And they are still crap. Total waste of time.

When was it 40 Baht to 1 GBP?

Pre 1997 crash, see the following links,

Hmm. Glad I missed those few years here. That was really over-valued.

I dont think that I have even known it lower than it is now at 49, and mostly I remember it at 60 - 70.

Another 4 days here, with half of Thailand due to arrive next Monday/Tuesday to squeeze the last drops out of it.

was it made with microsoft word ?

Hardly!

The source code looks like Dreamweaver.

The colours are a bit garish, but so is Pattaya!

The site does the job well enough, and is better than many so-called commercial sites I have seen here.