Visitors to last week’s Home and Condo Show in Bangkok will have been left in no doubt that it’s sales season so far as the property industry is concerned.
From 20 percent discounts, buy-one-condo-and-get-one-free offers and even a free BMW with your property purchase, all kinds of marketing initiatives were being used to tempt cash from buyers’ wallets for off-plan or fully-completed new projects.
One frustrating thing about the Thailand property and real estate market is the lack of up-to-date sales information for buyers and investors to make truly informed decisions.
Take Singapore as one example of what can be done. A sale today will be public information and on the Internet tomorrow – including the size of the unit purchase, the floor and the price paid – for everyone to see.
We’re obviously a very long way from that happening here, and to date we only have public research information up until the end of Q2 in June which indicated prices in central Bangkok were still rising, albeit at a lower rate, and concerns of oversupply in the suburbs were mounting.
So much could have happened since then.
Some property developers have well-oiled public relations machines that will instantly push out data relating to the latest sell-out of a new project, whereas others are either more reluctant to do so, or they simply do not have the ability to distribute the data.
Asking prices are a fair indication of where the market is heading – or they could equally be a gauge of how desperate or how greedy owners or property developers are at certain point in time.
Essentially property buyers and investors are largely guessing on what’s happening right now – today – in Thailand’s, and particularly Bangkok’s, property and real estate market.
