Grupo Expoacción

I run small events on Koh Samui and I have been here six years. I bought a condo last year and I want to explain one mechanic that confused me for months, because I have now heard three other people be confused by exactly the same thing.

In a Thai condominium building, only 49 percent of the total floor area can be owned by foreigners. That share is called the foreign quota. The rest is Thai quota.

What that means in practice: two identical units, same floor, same view, can carry different prices. The one inside the foreign quota costs more, because a foreign buyer can hold it in their own name. The one in Thai quota is cheaper and requires a different structure, usually a company or a long lease, which is a different set of costs and a different set of risks.

Things I did not know to…

I moved from Valencia to Dubai four years ago for work in events, and last year I bought off plan for the first time. Writing down what I misunderstood, because in Spain I had only ever bought something that already existed.

My mistake was that I compared flats. Here you are also comparing payment plans, and they differ far more than the flats do.

Some plans are tied to construction milestones, so you pay when the building actually reaches a stage. Others are tied to the calendar, so you pay on a date whether or not anything has been built. Those are two completely different risks, and they are presented in the same brochure with the same friendly percentages.

Post handover plans sound generous. Paying part of it over two or three years after you get the keys is genuinely useful. But read what happens if you want to sell…

A colleague of mine handles registration desks for medical conferences and she took a permanent contract with a venue group in Orlando in February. She asked me to help because I did the same move in 2019 and she does not read contracts patiently.

Her assumption was that Orlando is one market with one price. It is not. What her budget bought near Lake Nona and what it bought near Kissimmee were two different lives, and the drive to the convention centre at seven in the morning is not the same drive as at four in the afternoon.

The part that actually cost her time: short term rental restrictions. She wanted a place she could sublet during the weeks she travels, and half the communities she liked forbid rentals under six months. That is in the HOA documents, not in the listing, and nobody volunteers it.

What we ended up…

I organise small retreats and workshops, ten to twenty people, so I need a base with one big room and space for guests. I rented in Ubud for a year, then on the Bukit for a year, to see which one actually works.

Ubud: clients want it. Half of my bookings happen because the word Ubud is in the description. But a place with a proper big room is expensive, the traffic in the centre in season is worse than people admit, and everything is damp. My mats and my printed materials suffered.

Bukit: cheaper per square metre, dry, and the light for photos is a different world. The problem is transport for every single person, and some guests cancel when they see the distance from the airport in the wet season.

I kept a sheet of rents for both areas from https://bali.realestate/ across the whole year, and the monthly…