To working tourist: Your confidence in the 'strict regulations' governing lift maintenance may be informed by the poor girl who died today when the lift cable snapped.

That’s tragic, but my point was simply that lift maintenance is normally outsourced to a third party in response to your suggestion that it was the job of the management team.

Do you have a link to more details about the accident?

I have been stuck in a lift in a well known building here for 45 minutes. Impossible for staff to manually open the doors as the contracted maintenance engineer had accidentally take the emergency key with him on his last routine visit and was 45 minutes across town. I recall it got pretty hot in there. Oh, and the lift intercom didnt work. And when he arrived he didnt use the 'special key' but an ordinary screwdriver!

Good luck with your quest but dont make too many assumptions about being protected by the law.

Getting stuck in an elevator also happens back home, though there the elevator should dial up the central each morning, and if it doesn’t get a signal, it will refuse to go, so that part should rarely happen back home. Don’t know if the elevators do that here, though coincidentally KONE, the company responsible for servicing the elevators in The Shine (where I am currently staying) is also the company we use back home.

Can you PM me the name of the company responsible for maintaining the elevator you got stuck in? There should be a certificate in the elevator which also has an expiration date.

No. It's irrelevant to the general point I was making about your apparent expectation that life here is like 'back home' wherever that may be. And I will not name the building. It is well respected, and well known and the thai owner is a good friend. I was just unlucky.

No. It's irrelevant to the general point I was making about your apparent expectation that life here is like 'back home' wherever that may be. And I will not name the building. It is well respected, and well known and the thai owner is a good friend. I was just unlucky.

I have no expectations about things being like back home, but I do not believe that (paraphrasing) well managed buildings are hard to find, that the financial report of a building is untrustworthy, that management is there to steal from the owners, etc. and based on this thread, I have just been further convinced that on average, things work fine here, as the only people who have provided actual data in this thread confirms that, except for you being stuck in an elevator, but as you said, you were just unlucky, as the building is well respected, and as I said earlier, getting stuck in an elevator also happens in well-managed buildings in the west.

Karnkanok 3 in the Jed Yod area. Fits the bill.

Touch Hill Place Condo at Changpuak is very well maintained, fyi.

Can you PM me the name of the company responsible for maintaining the elevator you got stuck in? There should be a certificate in the elevator which also has an expiration date.

I honestly can't remember how many lifts I've got into in Thailand that do not have the certificate on display - it's become a game of sorts whenever we find ourselves in one we haven't been in previously. No certificates, I assume, means no maintenance contract. Doubtless this is illegal, but it happens a lot more often than you might imagine; I'm talking about various small hotels, condo's and even small shopping malls (this wasn't in Chiang Mai).

28 years ago in New Zealand, I went from the 18th floor to the basement in an sharp intake of breath. It was a bit scary at the time, but no panic or screaming or suchlike. I knew I wasn't going to die. I knew that there were good health and safety laws in place and that the lifts were serviced regularly and would comply with the standards of the time and I knew that the emergency intercom would work and that there would be someone monitoring it and that help would arrive very quickly. It really was nothing more than an inconvenience. I would not have that same confidence here, and if I weren't so bloody lazy I would take the stairs a lot more often than I do now.

I also would be very loathe to buy here in Thailand. We rent a very nice, large condo for a good price and our money is better off invested well (and very safely) back home, but of course we all have different investment strategies. We will never own our own home again, we realise now that it is a trap that our parents led us into; thinking that owning your own home was the only thing that mattered. We know now that once you take the emotion out of it, owning your own home is not financially efficient; the return we get from the purchase price is more than we will ever pay in rent, we aren't responsible for any maintenance or insurance and we are very mobile if we want to move, but of course that wouldn't suit everybody. Although property is very cheap here (comparatively; remember that property is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it) a lot of very serious thought should go into buying. I've played with the idea of leasing a property long term, improving and subletting, but even that would be fraught with problems, and the rental market here seems to be very over-supplied. We have 2 apartments in Melbourne, both of which came to be vacant in the first week of January. Both had over a dozen applicants when the agent put it on their website a couple of weeks before Christmas, and both only had 2 days vacant while cleaning and odd bits of maintenance were done. Here, some properties can be empty for a year or more before tenants appear, and it's not like anyone checks references here.

For me it's far too risky, but there are people here who are making a go at it, and good luck to them and anyone trying to do it. I'm very conservative with my money, but I sleep well every night.

While you were sleeping, the New Zealand Dollar has lost 10%+ against the THB in just 6 months.

Karnkanok 3 in the Jed Yod area. Fits the bill.

Karnkanok 2 at CBP is too..... so far. Knocking on wood.

In my view the most important element in getting a well run condo is the Committee.

For new condos, does the law specify timeframe & conditions for developer to handover the running of the condo to such an owners' management committee upon condo completion? I believe in the past, developers could "hang on" to control over the management of condos but not anymore. Presumably once the owners take over the running of the condo, things will improve for the better. No?

In my view the most important element in getting a well run condo is the Committee.

For new condos, does the law specify timeframe & conditions for developer to handover the running of the condo to such an owners' management committee upon condo completion? I believe in the past, developers could "hang on" to control over the management of condos but not anymore. Presumably once the owners take over the running of the condo, things will improve for the better. No?

I think a previous poster implied the opposite.

While the developer has unsold units, they might have their own people in the lobby to ensure everything runs smoothly and to do showings, sort out final details, etc.

Once the developer is gone, it rests on the owners, and this is where apathy can be a problem; if the quality of management deteriorates, will the board act? If not, will the owners act (on next AGM)?