With the never-ending (5 month) saga of trying to find land to purchase in Thailand, we finally found one that probably checks enough boxes and wanted to see what the extremely knowledgeable and sophisticated patrons of thaivisa aseannow think. The boots-on-the-ground opinion, as it were. As most are probably aware, land prices are going through the roof and there seem to be a lot of speculative sale offers testing the market with stupidly high prices (rice land outside of a major city ring road going for 800k-1mil baht a rai...).
The things we want are:
4-7 rai of farmland that will be suitable to build a house, not be in a moo/subdivision so we have some space (This land is actually just under 9 rai so more than we want, but not unreasonable)
within 30 min of a major town (This land is 20 minutes to Kalasin, 25 minutes to Mueang Maha Sarakham, 45 min to Roi Et, 50 min to Khon Kaen)
within 10 minutes to a small town for errands (only a few minutes outside of the "downtown" Yang Talat)
Within an hour of an airport (55min to Roi Et airport, 1hr5min to Khon Kaen airport - people keep telling us that they're planning on building an airport somewhere around Yang Talat to service Kalasin/Mueang Maha Sarakham; that seems like a bad idea, but this is LOS, so who knows)
Not too far (or close) to her family - Her brother's family lives in Chiang Yuen (closer to Khon Kaen) which is about 25min away. Her aunt and mom live about 1hr25 min south of here.
Preferably on a paved highway or with really easy access if just off a highway.
Has chanote, electricity, water (check)
Under 350,000 baht per rai. Any more than that and the land better be AMAZING. (This land is 340,000 per rai, so right at 3.0 million baht with the seller paying all taxes)
Location is here in Yang Talat on the main highway 12 that goes E/W between Khon Kaen and Kalasin or N/S to Mueang Maha Sarakham:
City-view of Yang Talat here:
Close-up:
Currently is rice land where they get 2 crops a year. We won't grow rice, but it's nice that the land/water is good so when we do plant vegetables/fruit trees for ourselves, we should be set. Since we're currently in the US, we're having her brother check it out for us this week for actual pictures of the land - The real estate pictures don't have many good shots of the actual land but they promise it's very nice...
It is off the highway and currently does have some dirt roads, but I think in the future these will be paved as the town continues to grow. Currently, there is just a small piece of dirt road that goes over the canal before it connects to a paved road in front of the land. And then going the other ways, they're already slowly paving some sections so would have to expect in the near future they finish the other stretches, and possibly even pave the 2 roads on each side of the canal back to the main roads north and south of my current position:
Any thoughts? Everyone tells us that 340,000 is still pretty high, but everything else we're seeing in the past month or two between Chiang Yuen and Yang Talat is 800k-1m per rai so I'm not how much of this is just conventional wisdom from land going for 100k or less X years ago. I don't think any of us believe that prices for land will ever go down, so this seems palatable enough given most "reasonable" land we see around 250-350k per rai.