Darrel

I see the 2nd Rd child beggars (and the women that "manage" them) many times a day. I cant avoid them as they are right outside my place.

From time to time I also see the large notes that are given to them by passing tourists. Also coins occasionally given by Thais. Financially I dont think they do badly at all.

In my opinion this is an appalling form of child abuse, about which the city, the government and the Western nanny QUANGOs seem to do nothing at all.

These tiny children spend countless hours every day sitting in the gutter and breathing in the most harmful fumes from passing vehicles. They get no mental stimulation at all, apart from looking at the writing on the McDonalds coffee cup they clutch.

And yet apparently no one does anything about it, preferring instead to worry about Norwegians engaging 17yr old hookers on Beach Rd for entirely voluntary nocturnal activities.

There is something seriously screwed up here.

The Poseidon brunch buffet is dead. RIP.

Long live the same buffet which starts on March 15 at the Casa Pascal on 2nd Rd in Pattaya (near the Avenue).

The price is 165B (I bet it will be 195B before the end of 2011) and the high quality of the ingredients makes it much bettter value than the decidedly naff 110B buffets that can be found at the likes of Apex and Lex etc.. Also much better value than any set breakfast in that area that I know of, unless you are an unconditional fan of black pudding and baked beans which you wont find at the Casa Pascal.

This is the only breakfast buffet in Pattaya (outside of a 5* hotel) that I have found that serves proper croissants and proper fresh bread, and not the sweet doughy dry stuff that most places have.

The only thing that I would find fault with is the orange juice, which isnt real. Just cheap Tang.

Currently I am looking at several condos within easy walking distance of Jomtien beach. They are popular buldings at the north end not miles down towards Na Jomtien. They come in at around 35-40kB/m² and personally I think they are still seriously overpriced.

A perfectly good condo 100m from the beach sold very recently for the same price per sqm and in my opinion that was pretty fair. The same condo probably cost 50% more to buy 5 years ago.

There is no justification at all for current high asking prices, and the proof is that people ask and ask and no one buys.

Not necessarily. Rental yield will depend on the purchase price. Eg. a 90 sqm 2-bedrm condo unit at Sukhumvit 61 purchased in 2006 would have cost Bt63k/sqm.

If rent is at Bt35k/mth, less Bt3k for common fees, net rent is Bt32k/mth giving over 6% pa yield.

But if you were to use a rental yield figure on recently completed projects to derive a rental price, the amount for rent will seem high because these projects were selling at Bt85-93k/sqm.

The only valid figure for calculation of a rental return will be todays value. Any other figure fails to take into account depreciation/appreciation. And any calculation of ROI without those is meaningless.

So all my comments are based on a percentage of todays property values.

The thing you're forgetting here is how much the GBP and the USD has dropped over the past few years. Before the economic crash we were getting about 70 baht to the GBP, making your speakers only about 7 GBP. You can't expect a Thai shop keeper to drop the price of his speakers because another countries currancy isn't doing to well.

Obviously, for tourists and anyone living here who earns their money abroad, it does make a big difference, but for anyone living and earning money in Thailand it makes no difference.

I'm not forgetting it at all. Most such items are made in China (or Thailand!) anyway and so the exchange rate is factored into the price. Besides which the Thai shopkeepers costs are hugely lower than those in the UK.

Saying this, the cost of cars, new and secondhand here is so high and always has been compared to back west. What I really don't understand is how taxis are so cheap, when the initial outlay to get a car is so high!

Taxis and bahtbuses are cheap here because labour costs and fuel/maintenance/road tax/insurance are much, much lower than they are in Europe. Also the expectation of the taxi owner if he is self-employed. S/E drivers in the West probably earn well in excess of 50,000GBP per year. I doubt many bahtbus drivers in Pattaya do the same (though they dont do too badly either).

Secondhand cars retain their value here better because people are more inclined to buy new in the West, if they can get the credit. Whereas here there are many people who know they cant afford to buy new and would never look beyond used. That is simple.

Yes, yes, street food with flies crawling over it and no running water to clean cutlery is much more sterile than a hot pizza fresh from the oven in an air-con place with a dishwashing machine.

The Manila pizza place I eat in didnt have air-con and probably didnt have a dishwashing machine. It was pretty classy though, at the time. The free doctor I saw (who, by the way, prescribed well-done toast and bananas, which worked incredibly well) said that nearly all the problems he saw stemmed from half-cooked food that was left lying around to be finished off later: like pizza toppings and BBQ buffets.

To be more precise about my diet here: I rarely eat meat at all and would never eat any sort of meat skewer no matter where it was from. I do eat plate-fulls of spicy seafood salads and noodles both from street vendors and cheap restaurants and none of them has ever made me ill. Probably because they dont hang around part-cooked for hours on end. Also seafood pad thai, seafood-balls and similar dishes, and lots of fried fish but not the sort that has a brown "batter" on it.

YMMV. I am not a doctor or a lawyer.

This thread got me thinking.

Back in Europe for 1200B/month (incl tax at 20%) I got:

Line rental

Free modem/router rental with wifi N

ADSL up to 20Mbs (I used to get about 8Mbs due to the distance to the exchange, but this was a real figure for a rock-solid connection and I could download at 8Mbs all day every day)

Repairs on-site within 24 hours

Unlimited free VOIP calls to over 100 countries worldwide (incl Thailand and Thai mobiles) via the router.

80 digital TV channels via a second box (also free), including HD channels.

No sign-up fee

No installation fee

1 yr contract

In theory the same thing here should cost well under 1000B

Which just goes to prove that rents and prices are far higher here than they should be.

Europe has very high import duty and VAT (VAT there is normally nearly 3 times what it is here). Also incredibly high wages and social security charges. Prices there are still often much lower than prices in Thailand.

A simple example:

PC speakers ordered online and delivered within 48 hours in the UK: GBP9 (450B) incl delivery. 12 months warranty.

The same speakers on the shelf in a large electrical store here: 550B. No delivery and no real warranty for that matter.

No, many prices are just plain high here and the cash must be going somewhere. I wonder where?

It isnt reasonable to compare the prices of used goods though as obviously the market is very different.

Control Panel : System : Advanced : Performance

A Kindle ereader cost 4,000 baht, delivered and taxed in Thailand.

Fair enough. They were somewhat more than that when I last looked.

For the same money I do get much more use out of my phone than I would out of an ereader, but of course that depends on how much reading one does.

Also I dont like the way they all seem to be locked to particular stores and file formats.

Rental yield is over 6% pa after common fees.

I think you are lucky to be getting that much. I doubt I would pay that, unless it reflected a bargain purchase price.

It would be interesting to know the OPs purchase price for his units, and how that compares with 40,000B rent.

Hmmmm. be a bit difficult to remember WS 20+ years ago, as it didn't exist then! If I remember rightly, it started about '96. I don't remember the exact date, but I was there at the beginning.

Walking Street existed well over 20 years ago, but it wasnt called Walking Street! It was just the continuation of Beach Rd. At that time there was far less traffic (hardly any private cars) and the traffic there was turned up South Rd as it does now, but then it was because the Beach Rd extension didnt actually lead anywhere. It just sort of fizzled out when you got past the hotels at the end as you near what is now the pier. In fact in those days if you walked past the last hotel there were no lights at all. So Walking Street was pedestrian de facto and there was just the occasional car or chartered bahtbus going along it in the evening.

Many condo owners seem to think that because they paid X a few years ago they should be able to sell for X (or even X+something) now. What they dont seem to realise is that condos here are overpriced today and 3 or 5 years ago they were seriously overpriced. Also the Baht has appreciated against many other currencies since then, which doesnt help the calculation. Many prices here still have to go down quite a way before they become realistic, I think.

And for anyone who is in doubt, a realistic price is a price at which one finds a buyer (or a tenant) within a month or so of putting the property on the market. If one is still waiting after 3 months then the price is simply much too high.

Yeah so does mine, but it's not a substitute for a dedicated ereader, particularly if your eyesight is no longer 20/20.

An Android phone also cost considerably more than an ereader.

Actually I get on well enough with ebooks on my phone, as long as I put my glasses on and turn the font size up. And I'm well past my "best before" date. The only real inconvenience is having to flip the pages often due to the small screen size.

My Android phone cost less than any ereader I know of (GBP90 : 4500B). It also does music, webpages, streamed video, Office applications, games, etc. Oh, and it even does phone calls.

"I have got 3 empty condos in Sukhumvit's prime location,( Soi 59) they have been so for many months

now, potential renters come, look and go, ..... the rent is reasonable too at 30-40k"

Cant believe I'm reading this. There is nothing reasonable about rent of 1000Euros per month for a condo in the third world. You can get a place in major European capital cities for less.

Want to know what "reasonable" rents are? Take 4% of the purchase price and then divide that by 12. That is a reasonable rent per month. So for a 5MB condo you should be looking at 16000B/month. And that assumes that the 5MB purchase price was itself reasonable, which it probably wasnt.

This country is full of unrented or unsold properties simply because the prices are too high. That is the only reason.

"I believe that you are allowed to own only one condo, but I know many farangs who have several."

I know of no limit to the number of condos you can buy here (apart from the 49% per building limit). There are many people who own dozens or hundreds, and this is what distorts prices upwards. If there was a limit of 1 or 2 or 3 units per person, which would be reasonable, then prices would drop to sensible levels.

My Android phone has a free Kindle app and other free apps that will open all sorts of ebooks, pdf files etc.

This may be a possible solution.

Ask 100 people where they got food poisoning in Thailand and most will say "hamburgers", "hotdogs", "pizzas", "kebabs", "chicken skewers", "buffets" and all the other Western junk food. Hardly any of them will say "papaya salad vendors" or "noodle soup vendors".

Moral? Stay away from Western junk food and stick to proper cheap Thai food.

In 30+ years of eating street food in SE Asia I only ever got food poisoning once. Where? From a pizza place in Manila about 25 years ago.

YMMV

"Chana Masala, Matar Paneer, Baingan Bharta, Butter Chicken, Prawn and Bean Masala, Veggie Pulao, Naan, etc. Starts at 12pm, all you can eat for 199thb."

Where is your Pattaya branch?

"Safari"

Haha.

From what I have learned, having the Premier service is much better and more reliable than the 5-700 baht packages from anyone. You have to step up to the Premier packages where the number of users is restricted so the line is not continually overloaded during peek use.

I disagree. I monitor the service my place has on a daily (hourly) basis. The main problem is not the contention, it is the infrastructure. Whilst the overall bandwidth does vary a bit during the day/night the main problem is that often national, international and even DNS servers dont respond at all, and connections to these sites and servers just fail, even though the DSL link stays up all the time (my place didnt change the default router password ).

This simply indicates a diabolical provider, and taking a more expensive package wont help at all. Crap is crap.

If it does start to sell here for 24.000 Baht + I wonder how I would convince my self, with out the help of a banned substance to part with all that cash ,

Hmm. Forget the 24,000B Samsung. Buy the 4,500B Blade. Spend the 19,500B on banned things (or indeed whatever you like).

I can think of a shed-load of things to spend 19,500B on. And all of them more interesting than a mobile phone.

YOU WILL BUY IT

No Matter How Much

Well, no, I wont actually.

I've got a ZTE Blade that cost only a fifth as much and it suits me fine.

YMMV

3. Seller and buyer along with lawyers/banker and big bag of cash go to the land office, everybody signs at land office, money changes hands,

And people wonder why Thailand is considered to be a third-world country.