Update

Well, it seems like I confused some people with my post last week about our trip. We are actually leaving on Thursday morning (3/27) to go to Krabi. We'll return on Sunday the 30th.

Tim and I went out with a real estate agent on Monday to look at some houses. We can terminate our lease in July, and we are thinking of moving to a different house in Nichada. The townhouse that we live in now is not bad, there are a just a lot of steps and it seems like things have been breaking. Not big things, but just lots of little things.

We really haven't decided whether we want to rent or buy. If we buy a house, then we will keep it as an investment property or sell it when we leave. One thing that we have decided is that we are going to stay in Nichada. We could get more for our money elsewhere, but its location relative to the school is a compelling draw.

We went and visited about a dozen or so places. Some of the places were for sale, and some for rent. Some of the places were privately owned, and some owned by the Nichada group and rented out.

Out of the dozen or so places we visited, I think that there were 4 or so that we thought were nice. All of those were only for rent and not for sale. I think our favorite was a house that had a pool just outside the patio doors, and a common play area for kids outside the back gate. This house, like the others we liked, had a more open floor plan.

One common theme of the places that we didn't like was the closed floor plan. In a lot of the Thai houses, the rooms are very much separated and distinct. Many don't flow into each other. Thais tend to close off the kitchen or keep it distinct in order to keep the smell of the food from the main part of the house.

I was a bit surprised at how poorly some people presented the houses that they were selling. Tim pointed out that it was different for the rental property. The property for rent generally looked very nice and well kept. The property for sale looked, as Tim described it, as something that they just wanted to rid themselves of. Take for example the house we visited where we were greeted by a rusty metal gate, a rusty bike in the drive way, paper garbage piled in the driveway, and a swimming pool that was half filled with yellowish brown water. The house itself had other issues, but the initial presentation was off putting. Its not like they were offering the house as a cheap fixer up, the purchase price of this would have been significantly more than our house in the U.S. How much could it cost to drain the pool, paint the fence, move the bike and clean up some paper refuse? Probably less than the lost sales opportunity or reduced sales price.