A rainy day, so an ideal time to visit some property developments and pour scorn where appropriate (Spoiler: it was appropriate everywhere).
Out of town and headed south. Much further south than their brochure would have you believe; but finally we arrived at The Beaches.
This project has been touted for years; but it really made headlines last year when one of the directors of the project made off with about a hundred million baht of deposits from eager investors. Of course the company took full responsibility and announced it would honour any contracts distanced themselves from their director and told the customers to sue the thief directly.
Since then, all has been quiet, so it seemed time to go and check out progress. There will be hotels, condominiums, a water park, spa, tennis academy and a host of other world-class features. After a year of construction, maybe some of these facilities would be nearing completion?
In summary, no. In detail, there were some workers moving around some mud; but as all this was happening in the vicinity of the sales office it was not clear whether the mud was being moved for show or as part of the very early stages of construction.
We went into the sales office which was spacious, as sales offices tend to be. There were indications of people in rooms, but nobody came to greet us. We waited ten minutes and examined various posters and a rather shabby model of the development. Then a man appeared and asked what we wanted. I told him we were interested in buying a condo. He told me he was responsible for the water park. I told him I was not interested in buying a water park; at which point he wandered off. We waited a little longer but nobody else seemed interested; so we left.
Still, they don’t really need a sales office because they recently announced that they were going for a new approach to marketing. Not for them the usual flashy Flash based sites because “most real estate projects use Flash technology that presents brilliantly-animated images but fail with their eMarketing efforts because of it.” Instead, The Beaches “will be the first large-scale real estate development project in Asia to employ Web 2.0 as its online publicity vehicle.”
If you don’t know, and I didn’t, Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as being “commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.”
Pretty cool, except The Beaches website offers the standard flashy Flash based site which presents adequately animated images but zero collaboration. A shame, I would have liked to have gone interactive on their asses and told them their sales office sucks and that I have no interest in paying an exorbitant amount of money for what is currently a small area of mud.
Back towards Pattaya and White Sands Beach.
In 2005, Grande Asset announced a project to construct a condominium to be called The Sails; and very smart it looked too. Sold well initially by all accounts and construction got underway.
Then the project was put on hold, for reasons that were unclear. The CEO of Grande Asset sold off his shares and formed a new company called Apex. A few weeks later, Apex announced a new development next door to the partially completed and abandoned Sails project. The new condo was called White Sands Beach with a design that looked very similar to The Sails. You couldn’t make this up.
Construction started more than two years ago so we were excited to see how things were going. They weren’t.
On the right is what remains of The Sails project. On the left is nearly two and a half years of construction progress on White Sands Beach. Five years of fucking around with two projects; and this is all they have to show for it.
Still, there was a sales office and there was an actual sales person who greeted us very nicely. She had no brochures “because the designs had changed”; but she did have a price list which indicated obscene prices. I asked her when the building would be complete and she said “two years”…… She also told me that construction of The Sails would start again soon. I guess she just has to repeat what she is told.
The day wasn’t going very well in our search for a believable sales pitch; so I decided to play it safe and visit the offices of Raimon Land, one of Thailand’s most respected construction companies; or so they tell us. This took us to The Avenue shopping centre and the swanky sales office for *The Lofts *project. I remember going there a couple of years ago and being shown a sales chart with many units already sold or reserved; what a success story! But now the sales office, whilst still outwardly proclaiming the project, is closed, so no chance of meeting an eager sales executive. And a check at the construction site confirmed that the project is dead (the condo in the background is not The Lofts, it is a development by a company that actually built something).
One last chance for a sales pitch to brighten our day. Off to The Waterfront. I will admit I have been hard on them in the past, more than once in fact; but here was their chance to wow me with their proposal.
Checked on the construction site and no real progress since the last time I looked; maybe the grass was a little longer:
Walked down towards the sales office; but there wasn’t one. The project is abandoned.
What a disaster. Never mind, tomorrow I will go to the Ocean 1 sales office; that should be good for a laugh.
Serious note: Never, ever, buy anything here that isn’t already built.