How To Avoid Getting Hustled When Purchasing A Property?

[cyprean]

How to avoid getting hustled (when purchasing a property)

a) by the seller? Structural problems, bad neighbours, other issues?

b ) by the lawyer? High fees, incompetence and other things? How to select a good lawyer?

c) by the agent? If the agent has his friend engineer fake do a structural analysis for example.

It feels like there are many pitfalls and too many people trying to suck out every baht they can. Prices for house inspections or standard lawyer fees are hidden. Please dont bother with the "dont buy so you will avoid all trouble". I would rather assess the risk myself.

It would be best for the buyer if a seller of a property would agree to rent the place out for a set period of time before the buyer could decide. That would prevent many bad purchases.

[antony77]

avoid farang agents and get a valuation from the bank and make a thorough inspection yourself

[quiksilva]

Sweeping statements such as avoid everyone and everything should be taken with a healthy dose of salt.

What it all boils down to is: YOU.

You need to do some home work.

Real estate here is sold as seen (for the most part) and as such the onus is on you to investigate the structural integrity of say your house etc. (Unless the seller is contractually obliged to do so in your agreement with you).

In the case of a condominium, the seller of an individual unit is unlikely to be able to give you any guarantees as to it structural integrity, however they could provide copies of annual reports of their AGM's or EGMs where major repairs and problems should be discussed.

If you want to find out if the neighbours are 'bad', who can say? It's too subjectove, so the best you can do is meet them, yourself.

Before you use an agent (or any consultant for that matter) verify their track record, ask around for opinions and get references. Why would you let the agent appoint an engineer to do your structural due diligence, YOU should be the one who does this. Agents of course can provide contact details but if you want to avoid conflicts of interest you need to recognise that most agents work solely for the vendor. Some more enlightened agents realise that this is a short term outlook, but if you work on that assumption you can remove problematic issues before they arise.

If however you let the agent and lawyer do everything for you, even when it may be a conflict of interest then you open yourself up to trouble.

Caveat Emptor

[xylophone]

avoid farang agents and get a valuation from the bank and make a thorough inspection yourself

The problem with this is that the bank will more than likely give you a lower valuation based on the government valuation (plus??), whereas the market valuation could be well in excess of this.

This becomes very obvious when the land office registers the property at 3 million baht when you have just paid 5 million baht for it. The bank and government valuations have no bearing on the market price of a property.