Hua Hin Hot Topics - What Credit Crunch?
Serenity descended on Hua Hin once more following last weekend’s Bangkok teenage party at the Honda Summer Music Fest on the beach in Khao Takiab. As expected organisation was shocking and the roads in and out of Hua Hin were gridlocked, there were reports of journeys of a couple of kilometers taking as many hours, even on a bike!
Takiab beach the following day looked like the Lebanon and the sad fact is that a lot of the plastic discarded by revellers the night before will end up washed out to sea. Thai fishermen are bad enough with their polystyrene contributions to marine habitats, and teenagers with plastic bottles just compound a problem that nobody seems to care about.
One thing that can be said is that it doesn’t seem like the Thai youth are suffering too much from the global financial slowdown, some of the cars they were driving were worth more than most people’s houses.
Hua Hin in general doesn’t seem to be that affected on the surface but then the town is unique; a large number of local Thai business people, property owners and old time Hua-Hinians are affluent enough to ride out any financial storm anyway. It has always been the town for the elite and the aspiring.
Just look at the boutique hotels that are popping up along Naebkehardt road like mushrooms after the rain. With fewer tourists than ever before many of these places are perpetually empty, aside from the odd long weekend when the wide boulevard-like road is lined with Benzes bearing Bangkok plates. The owners don’t seem to mind though; it’s just something else to spend money on.
The property pot started to bubble again as articles from the UK media stated that buyers have lost money following investments into property around Black Mountain Golf Course. The cause, they claim, is Joe Cole who endorsed a condominium complex and encouraged people to invest. Well good ol’ Joe got his pad for free and the company responsible for the development has now gone bust according to the Mirror tabloid.
Not sure what is more astounding, the premise that people will buy into something they can’t fully own in a foreign country they have never been to without seeing the finished product just because the pictures looked pretty on the website or that they’ll buy it because a football player has one.
Caveat emptor is a phrase we often hear when dealing with real estate in Thailand - it should be written in bold and capitals when referring to real estate in Hua Hin.