Why I Plan to Buy a House during the Rainy Season in Thailand
The floods are now beginning to recede, and it turns out that my wife’s prediction about the rain was accurate (read here). The water never managed to cross our door, but it was uncomfortably close at one stage. The remaining stagnant water stinks but the sun is strong today so it should be all gone within a couple of days.
Buying a House in Thailand
I do plan to buy a house in Thailand at some point in the future. Of course, it will actually be my wife and son’s house because foreigners are not allowed to own property in Thailand (with the exception of condos). It will also be bought by a mortgage in my wife’s name. Still, I’m sure Oa won’t mind if I refer to it as “my house”. I’ve no great urge to own property in Thailand (not that I will own it), but it just makes sense. I wouldn’t cost us much more to pay a mortgage then it does for our monthly rent – at least we would have something to show for it at the end of the day.
When we do get around to buying a house I want this to be in the rainy season. Not because I think that this would be a good time to move – it wouldn’t be. The aim would be to find out how the property handles the worst of Thai weather. My wife has no problem accepting this logic as her father built a house that spends three months of the year underwater. Remarkably she is not bitter about this, but she did learn a valuable lesson.
One of our neighbors found out today that a buyer for her house has just had second thoughts. This savvy investor waited for the rains to do their worst before sealing the deal. He revisited the house a couple of days ago and saw that it was half underwater – a deal breaker. I plan to follow this sensible approach for buying houses in Thailand, and I’d advise other people to do the same.
Your photo here looks just about like the floating market, minus the merchandise!
Hi Lynne, the floods did give the local area an interesting new look. A floating market out front would have been very handy 🙂
Flooding in itself is not a general guide to water ingress and inundation as it is greatly effected by the direction the rains have come and can vary from year to year. Take Pattaya for example, heavy rains in Chonburi will nearly always cause flooding in the north of Pattaya but not the south, Jomtien etc, however heavy rains in Rayong and to the east will flood Pattaya to the North and South.
You are far better off getting a copy of the latest local hydrographic survey and take it to any decent civil engineer they will be able to show you simulations of water levels using common software then simply avaoid all know low water areas.
Thanks Lloyd, you have a more sensible approach to things than I do. I had to Google “hydrographic survey”
Its called “lessons learnt” 😉
Theres nothing like watching your house float away to spur you onto understand something!
That does sound like an effective way to learn something Lloyd 🙂