Chiang Mai Property Market

The property market in Thailand, and especially Chiang Mai, has some rather unorthodox characteristics which seem to defy all sense of economics and common sense. For sure, Thais see property as a wise investment and during the country's rapid growth over the last thirty years there has been a building boom that has changed the suburban face of the country. Activity has reached fever pitch as new buildings spring up everywhere; housing complexes, highrise apartments, hotels, restaurants, bar shacks, you name it; yet look all around you and you'll notice Chiang Mai has an awful lot of empty and abandoned properties, some of them on very good land and in great locations. In fact, you'll soon also notice there is little zoning here and hardly any distinction between good and bad areas. While some locations might be more expensive than others there is no such thing as the 'rich' suburb here. A huge mansion may sit beside a shack, a plush looking housing estate full of expensive mansions might have several empty overgrown plots scattered about, and a prime riverfront piece of land might have a ramshackle old house on it. It makes no sense; however, the housing market in Thailand (outside of Bangkok) only really began maturing some twenty years ago when laws were changed, granting full ownership of land to inhabitants and allowing free sale.

In the early nineties when Chiang Mai begun opening up to tourism, wealthy Bangkok and Hong Kong speculators moved in and snapped up lots of property hoping to make a quick fortune, but the locals couldn't afford the inflated rents and then the crash of '97 arrived. Housing consortiums went bankrupt, land fell into disuse and the banks cleaned up. However, there's more land than money here and people here don't like giving up anything to a buyers' market, so the prime land remains undeveloped and large luxury houses uninhabited, meanwhile new developers have moved further out, buying up large tracts of former rice field and turning them into 'the great Thai urban dream'. These remote 'densely packed villages' have become immensely popular among the new upwardly mobile class, while the 'old money' land nearer the city remains empty.