Resorts, luxury condos still holding their own

Amid the current political turmoil, most of the resort properties and high-end condominiums in Bangkok are still doing well depending on their location, design and price point.

Robert Collins, managing director of the property agency Savills Thailand, said that as tourism performance remained very positive, this translated into a positive resort market.

"Thailand remains the holiday destination for the region, particularly for Singapore and Hong Kong, where the concentration of money is. Thailand\'s resort destinations are a short-haul flight," he said.

The booming tourism industry has led to greater demand for condominiums and villas because not everybody wants to spend their holiday in a hotel room, especially families with children.

"We certainly see that resort locations in general are really unaffected by any political environment, be it positive or negative," said Mr Collins. "It has very limited effect. It's more in terms of international buying. The state of the economic markets in Hong Kong and Singapore will have greater short-term impact.

"The long-term buying trends in Europe remain quite robust because they tend to be an older demographic. It\'s not impulse buying. These are long-haul visitors that have planned for this type of investment."

Also, despite the fresh round of demonstrations in Bangkok, Mr Collins does not expect any decline in the values of premium grade-A condominiums over the next 18 months, irrespective of the wider economic or political situation in the short term.

Typically, he said, property prices in Bangkok were very slow to adjust to any downward pressure and in fact his company was seeing the opposite, with upward pressure evident.

"There is immense private wealth internationally that wasn\'t there to the same extent after 1997-98 _ privately held money that is not immune to oil prices and food prices but is sitting there waiting to be invested. Those types of investors are quite keen to invest in specific types of premium-grade property in emerging markets and Thailand is on the radar for a lot of those buyers and they are supporting these prices."

Source: http://www.thailand-property-guide.com/?p=news/article&NewsID=787