EXCLUSIVE: “Pattaya has a promising future as a key market for Thai condominium development. It is riding on the property boom.”
Most industry observers will think we’ve gone crazy because those developers and real estate agents with first-hand and current experience will testify the property and real estate market in the Gulf of Thailand city is quiet at best, with an oversupply in certain condominium sectors that seem to vary in number from research report to research report.
However those opening words, amazingly, were published just two years ago in 2013 by one of Thailand’s top real estate firms as part of its outlook for the condominium property sector in Pattaya.
Everyone makes mistakes but how could this firm have got it so wrong, even when most real estate industry professionals could probably have see the signs looming ahead?
Clayton Wade, Managing Director of Pattaya’s Premier Homes Real Estate, is arguably one of the most experienced and most informed observers in the Pattaya market.
He told Dot Property Group: “Reading the outlook article published two years ago immediately reminded me of my own ‘predictions’ slightly more than two years ago.
“My post New Year’s prediction was that Pattaya and the Eastern Seaboard had a huge oversupply of new condos and not enough purchasers to get rid of them – and that was more than a year before the Russians disappeared and local Thais joined the ranks of Asia’s highest consumer debtors.”
Wade finally used the ‘C’ word in several interviews and reports in December 2014, stating that Pattaya’s new construction condominium market had crashed.
“So on the one hand this 2013 Outlook was totally off the mark, but I must add in all fairness that Pattaya has been a difficult market to read at times.
“Although I hit the mark well with my ‘oversupply’ prediction and the fact that Pattaya’s new construction industry had collapsed, I even wrote during the interim of those two prognostications expressing a possible turn around or second wind in the new construction market.
“The point being [and the answer to why the outlook got it so wrong] is that it’s not easy to gage the real estate and particularly the new condo construction market here on the Eastern Seaboard; in fact it’s pretty darn difficult! It takes a lot of confidence and local knowledge to make forecasts for any property sector anywhere, and that goes double here on the eastern Seaboard,” added Wade.
