Feel like moving to the country, while still being near the city? The house down the way is for sale, at around $22,000 USD or 700,000 baht. The road in front is dirt now, but within a few months it will be concrete, same as the recently upgraded road in front of our house.
I have no idea how many bedrooms are inside, but you can see it’s a good size home, with few neighbors of it’s own. At this point in time, the only near dwellings are behind it.
As you may have guessed, at just over $20K USD, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper. However, I know from recent experience, even with a house unoccupied for several years, it doesn’t take too much effort to get it livable again. Houses here are concrete and brick, rather than wood. Cleaning and painting, sure, but probably not any structural damage. Putting another $5K to $10K and you’d have quite a nice little house, and grounds.
It does have the basic form, just needs some polish. A boundary wall would be good, rather than the tin sheeting. Someone’s been keeping up with the greenery, so it’s not all overgrown like our house was. If the inside is in the same condition as the outside, I doubt all that much effort would be required to get it “farang-ready”. I didn’t see any air conditioning compressors when I was looking at the front of the house, so unless there is one in the rear, there is no air conditioning. For our house, we have three; two working and one broken, and so far we’ve only turned them on to test them.
Not that I’m all that frugal, but I do try to limit our use of air conditioning as much as possible. Unless it’s really awful, I’d rather use a fan, or passive cooling (open some windows for a cross breeze.)
So, like I mentioned, it would be cool so have some English speaking neighbors. I don’t personally know who owns the house, if it’s the bank, or an individual or company. There’s a fair amount of land in our community area repossessed by one bank or another. I’m not sure, but I suspect a bank would be more interested in turning over the property rather than speculating on how much more the land should be jacked up after the announcement of a second Ring Road for Udon.
If anyone is interested, let me know, and I’ll ask Bua to ask the Village Big Boss how to contact the owners.
Non-Thai citizens are not allowed to buy land. However, Thai companies can buy land, so if you have (or create) a Thai Company, that company can buy and own the land for you. If you’re married to a Thai national, it’s just a matter of buying the property for your spouse, and if you’re hedging your bets, leasing the house back to yourself for 30 years, with an option for another 30 years.