Buying a House in Hua Hin with a Thai Girlfriend

Step 1 Getting the Mortgage

Obviously my girlfriend was working, I was in Bangkok. We decided to come down to Hua Hin because it’s a much more relaxed vibe down here. Initially we were going to rent. And I suggested to her because she’d been working in the hospital for 20 years I said, “Why don’t you try and get a mortgage first, a bank loan, and then once we’ve got it and we’ve purchased a house, you can finish the job.”

Just so happens she’s actually got another job here in Hua Hin now in a hospital, but that’s another story. So that’s what we decided to do. She went and saw the mortgage people that are linked to the hospital where she was working, and she managed to get a mortgage. The maximum they would lend her was 2.4 million baht. You can work that out in your own currency.

So we were quite limited on what we could buy because although property is cheaper here in Thailand, 2.4 million isn’t really a lot for a house even here in Hua Hin.

Step 2 Finding the House Dealing with Agents

So the first thing we had to do was find the house. One of the questions that comes up quite often was, “Could you recommend a good agent? Somebody to spot houses for us, find houses?”

That was very, very difficult for a few reasons. First of all, we did deal with two or three agents, but they don’t work in the same way as you’re used to agents working. They’re very kind of “you have to constantly call them and follow them up.” When I’ve worked with agents in the past in other countries, a house comes up and they’re straight on the phone to you “I can pick you up. What time do you want to be there?” They’re really proactive. But here, they don’t seem to be as proactive.

You go along to an agent and you tell them what you’re looking for “I’m looking for a two or three bedroom house, whatever.” They’ll show you what’s on their books. They’ll take you to those houses if they’re available. And then after that, they don’t seem to call you back if you don’t buy one of those houses. You have to keep pushing going back there, calling “Has anything new come in?” That’s the experience we found anyway.

So, having a Thai girlfriend helped a lot because what she did was she went onto Facebook. There’s a lot of groups on there a lot of agents, independent agents who advertise themselves on Facebook. Generally what they’ll do is put up a couple of houses and a phone number. And that’s how we found the agent that brought us to this place a nice young guy actually.

He picked us up in the car from central Hua Hin, brought us here. We initially looked at a house three doors down which we were going to purchase, but I pulled out. I told my girlfriend we’re not going to buy it because the next door neighbor built some huge kind of platform structure that would have overlooked the property we were going to buy.

Luckily, this one was empty which is kind of three houses down from that one. It wasn’t totally complete. But I sat down with the agent. I said, “Look, we’ll buy this, but I want it in writing that the house will be exactly the same as what we’ve seen down there the one that’s completed with the curtains, with a little bit of furniture, the paint scheme, everything. I want it to be exactly the same, and then we’ll commit to purchase.” The juristic people the builders their administration office was very good. We came back down and it was all exactly the same, and we were very happy with it. And they were very good actually. You get a one year guarantee on the house if anything goes wrong, they’ll come along and sort it out. We’ve had a few things happen, and they’ve sorted them out.

Step 3 The Legal Process No Lawyer Required?

Now, what confused me I’ve bought property in the UK lots of times. The first thing you would do is hire a lawyer (or solicitor as we call them in the UK), and you would give them the details of the property, and they would act on your behalf, dealing with the estate agent who was selling the property.

It doesn’t work like that here. You don’t go out and get a lawyer the way we do it in the West. So what happened is the money came from a bank called the Thai Government Bank. That’s the biggest bank that lends money for Thais to buy property. That’s who we dealt with, but we had very little to do with them.

So how it works is: once we’d agreed to buy this house, the juristic people and if that word’s unfamiliar to you, that’s the administration people who built this estate where we live they deal with the bank. We had to go to the bank initially to apply for the loan. My girlfriend did anyway it’s not my loan, is it? Eventually they approved it only took three weeks. They approved 2.4 million for us to buy this house.

Now, instead of having a lawyer going on your behalf, what happens is on the day of the sale, she gets what they call a Tabian Ban it’s a blue book that says she owns the house and the land.

How it works here is really strange. I was a little bit confused. I just had to kind of go with the flow. I was a bit anxious because I thought, “Oh, no lawyer we can’t check the paperwork. What’s going on here?” Because I’m normally used to getting a load of paperwork and giving it to a lawyer.

So what happens is on the day of the completion, the final sale a representative from the bank who’s lending the money goes to the local land registry office, and the juristic person (the person who’s selling the house) they all meet in the bank. What happens is the juristic give the contract to the government bank employee. And because they’re lending money for houses all the time, they know exactly what to look for in the contract. So it kind of works really well because the juristic can’t play about in the contract thinking, “Well, these people won’t see that line.” It’s very difficult for them to scam because when that contract finally goes to the bank’s representative, he goes through it with a fine tooth comb. And once he’s happy with the contract, he tells the bank to release some money to the juristic (to the developer). They’ve now had their money, and they handed the keys to us it was that simple. If you go along and buy a house and you find that’s how it’s working, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. As long as you use the Thai Government Bank, you’re going to be fine.

Step 4 Buying Land as a Foreigner What You Need to Know

Now, you’re going to have to have a Thai wife or a Thai girlfriend if you’re going to buy property and land, because obviously as a foreigner, you can only buy a condominium an apartment but you can’t buy land here. Technically you can, but it’s a lot of red tape, a lot of money, and a lot of running around. Most people who try to do it through a company are not very successful.

Step 5 The Loan No Deposit and Extra Cash

Another thing that was really strange here is that when they lend the money, they don’t work like where I come from. If a house comes to 100,000 pounds for instance, they’ll lend you 100,000 pounds less a deposit. Here, there was no deposit zero. I don’t really know why. What I think it might be is because she’s a first time buyer. That’s just me assuming. With the language and everything, I couldn’t quite dig down that deep my Thai isn’t good enough. I won’t pretend it is.

And the loan was actually that they agreed on. The cost of the house was only about 2,300,000, but they actually gave us 2,400,000. Those figures aren’t exactly right, but I’m just trying to give you the example. What I’m trying to say is they gave her 100,000 baht more than the cost of the house and that’s normal here. The reason they do that is because a lot of young Thai people who buy property haven’t got the money to go out and buy the air conditioners. The air conditioners were about 55,000 baht. (We didn’t do all the rooms the smallest bedroom has no air conditioning. We just use that for storage.)

They give you that extra 100,000 baht, and they just transfer that to my girlfriend’s account. But then what they do is they take the first month’s mortgage out of it. The mortgage at the moment is about 11,000 baht a month which obviously I’m paying. Great deal for me, because I was paying 21,000 in rent. I haven’t put a wad of cash into this place. I bought a bit of furniture and everything, but if it went south, I haven’t lost a lot.

Step 6 Moving In and Buying Furniture

So the bank lent the money. The house has been paid for. The 100,000 extra we went out and bought air conditioners and a fridge and a sofa and things like that. I put some of my money into things like a bedroom suite, coffee table. There’s various bits and bobs I had to buy a 10m hose pipe, some chairs for outside, washing line. All that sort of thing. Oh, it adds up. Little things add up over time. And then we basically moved in.

One tip I’ll give you if you come to Hua Hin, check out Index Living Mall. They’re a big furniture store they supply everything: beds, sofas, tables. I bought probably 90% of our furniture from there, the rest from other independent stores.

Step 7 Location Swings and Roundabouts

Another question that people ask is, “What area are we in?” Obviously I’m not going to tell you exactly where we live I’ve been threatened. I don’t do anything to harm other people. I don’t speak badly of anybody at all, but there are crackpots out there. I’ve had guys threaten to smack me in the face if they see me. Real weird people. So obviously I’m not going to say, “I live on this estate.”

But what I will say is this. If you’re on a limited budget and you and your girlfriend want to buy a house, it’s all swings and roundabouts. If money’s no option if you’ve got 5 or 6 million you can live in the center of Hua Hin in a good area. You’ll be on what they call a Moo Ban a kind of gated community. You’ll have landscaped gardens, probably a children’s play area, there’ll be a big shared pool. You can walk around at night there’s no soi dogs. That’s great, it’s fantastic.

But if you haven’t got that much money like we had 2.4 million you’ve got to do the best you can with what you’ve got. So we moved out. We’re about 8 km from the Hilton Hotel, which is in the center of Hua Hin near enough the center anyway. So we’re not on a gated community. We’re just on a typical Thai street. We’ve got nice neighbors. It’s nice and quiet. There’s a few chickens in the background. Over there, there’s nothing. We get the odd truck go by because they’re still building at the end of the road.

As I say, it’s swings and roundabouts. We’re happy that we got a nice house. The house itself: three bedrooms, two bathrooms. We’ve got a big carport there. Plenty of space if I want to get a dog. The garden is dog proof he wouldn’t get out. We accepted that, because of our limited funds, we couldn’t live in the center of town unless we rented and that would have defeated the whole object.