David Beckham nonsense on Koh Samui

Once again David Beckham’s “house on Koh Samui” has hit the headlines around the world. Reports are that he has installed a state of the art mosquito repellant/killer (depending on which report you read) and that the local Monks are up in arms about killing living creatures. One wonders why then the Monks are not protesting at Tesco, Big C etc. about the mosquito sprays, rat poison, and other insect zappers they sell and why companies such as Rentokil are not targeted! What nonsense! Then they go and publish a photograph of “his house” which actually belongs to someone else. Even Samui Express picked this up and published it and they really should have known better. I copy that article below out of interest only. Just goes to show you cannot believe everything you read in the papers.

I reported last month on problems we had with our web site being hacked which was at the best disconcerting, but we were able to resolve that issue relatively quickly. If anyone still has problems accessing our site or gets warning messages – particularly is you use the Firefox browser, please let me know. We also discovered an issue with emails in that due to the number of emails I send out, not least of which are the ones distributing this Newsletter, our out-going mail server started to reject mails as it identified them as potential spam. We changed our outgoing mail server but as a precaution I also use my gmail accounts hbonning@gmail.com and ksprop.harry@gmail.com and kosamuiproperties@gmail.com so if you receive mails from any of these accounts they are legitimate and from me.

Well there is good news and there is bad news. And they are both the same. Asking prices are coming down and quite significantly. This is due to a combination of factors, mainly of course the world wide economic situation and lack of credit. As Thailand has always been a cash purchase scenario due to the absence of finance for foreigners, and as most people are hanging on to what cash they have these days, the market has all but dried up. There are still buyers around but they are only looking at really attractive deals. Combine this with the fall in the value of the British Pound as a prime example and you can see that from Baht 64 to the pound last June to Baht 50 to the pound today, this represents a 28% increase in the cost of a property here in Sterling terms. However, on the other hand anyone selling here can reduce the price of their property by 28% in Baht and still achieve the same result in Sterling. As an example, a house for Baht 10,000,000 would have cost £156,250 in June last year but would cost £200,000 today. Equally that house could now be purchased at a Baht price of Baht 7,812,500 and still maintain the Sterling price. So the good news for buyers is that property is getting cheaper – provided you are not paying in Sterling.

We have seen a number of owners reducing their asking prices accordingly and some quite dramatically taking into account the factors mentioned above but also due to personal circumstances which are producing some very interesting possibilities. We have one large sea view property on a large site that was offered at Baht 60 million which is now available at a drastic reduction to Baht 25 million for a quick sale and another hilltop house which last month was Baht 24 million now available at Baht 13 million. These are exceptional purchases for someone with a medium to long term view.

Progress is being made on the Marina project I reported about in the November 2008 Newsletter. Towards the end of last month bore holes were drilled to investigate the ground conditions for construction.

Below I have reproduced an article I wrote last November for C-Publishing and which will appear on the March Issue of C-Holiday magazine. As at this time I do not have a direct link to the article in the magazine but the general link is http://c-publishing.com/ .

Generally everything remains pretty quiet having regard to this is still High Season. The world economy is certainly having its effect on tourism although there do seem to be a fair number of stalwarts who continue travelling but in far fewer numbers. The next surge would be expected at Easter and Song Kran, so we must keep our fingers crossed for good reports.

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