Something I only learned after three years of renting abroad. I have been in Chiang Mai since 2023, paying 15,000 baht a month for a one-bed near Nimman, and I never once added the years together. When I did, the total was about what a small studio costs outright.
The rules matter more than the price here. Foreigners cannot own land in Thailand, only condominium units, and each building can sell at most 49% of its area to foreigners. That cap is per building, so in the popular ones it is used up years ago. Older resale buildings usually have their big common-area repairs behind them, but ageing lifts and pumps come out of the owners' sinking fund - ask what is in that fund before you talk price.
9 Views
Sitting in a co-working space, I noticed the guy next to me moving incredibly fast through a complex backend setup. I asked him what magic tool he was using, and he wrote the address on a piece of paper for me. https://sharkscode.com/ The sheer volume of practical, ready-to-use modules that actually did what they claimed fascinated me. I thoroughly enjoyed the clean syntax and how easy it was to integrate into my own environment. At that point, I was stuck in a horrific losing streak, having burned through my savings on a failed app launch and ready to shut down my server for good. I integrated a module from this place into my broken app, relaunched it, and suddenly got a flood of paid subscribers. It completely wiped out my previous financial disaster and left me with a very comfortable surplus to enjoy while living in Ukraine.