advocate wrote:Why pay someone to manage your build who wants to maximise their profit by using the cheapest materials and crappiest workmanship. They are in a conflict of interest and will look after themselves first.
You don't employ someone who will try to maximise profits by using cheap materials and 'crappy' materials, that wouldn't be a wise move obviously. And you've already said yourself you need someone to manage the trades, in your case yourself because you are capable of doing the job, obviously not everyone is, or they don't have the time or they simply don't fancy the role. Now 5-8 years ago or whenever the period, it was boom time and everyone was buying, building, botching and what-have-you, and many of the things being said on the thread occured, and we've all had to live with it since.
But this is now, and the dust has settled, the skeletons are out of the closets -- or in the foundations -- and we're at a situation where there's more than enough established farang developers/project managers/building foremen, whatever you want to call them, to meet the demand there is out there. Sure there's still some dodgy one's around too and sure people are still gonna get ripped off... but if buyers are contientious enough and do their homework... then the level of rip-off's should not be any greater than in any other Thailand-based investment/manufacturing/developing industry. There's maybe a dozen developers I could think of who have built 3, 4, 5, 6 developments without buyers being ripped off or their roofs falling in.
They're not in the business of using inferior materials or shoddy workmanship, they wanted to be building still 8 years later, squeezing extra profits out at the expense of their reputations is counter-productive. If there's a cock-up on a build that means you lose 20% of your margin putting it right then that's the prudent decision to make, they're in it for the long haul which makes such hiccups manageable. Established developers have material specifications and dozens of 'show houses' as benchmark. Collectively they may have built 500+ houses between them. Spend a couple of hours with owners of the houses they built 6, 7, 8 years ago, owners are only to happy to inform whether good or bad.
There's absolutely no need for big deposits or stage payments these days, developer's won't turn away sales where the buyer stipulates schedule where payments are never more than say 5% in advance of progress. Many developers will do something more or less unheard of previously and transfer the land to you with the initial payment, so when for example you pay the main deposit of say 500k, you register the land rights for a land plot valued far in excess of that... then construction stages progress and you make payments upon their completion. The developer is the one with the financial exposure against the contract sum, you're still financing the works but developer is more than happy to retrieve his land investment and earn his construction margin.
And the whole sorry saga just gets too ridiculous when you buyers who were wronged turn round and smear us with these sweeping, ill-informed generalisations. It's like
'hello, what the f*** has it got to do with me exactly?'... I'm not on the side of the scam developer cos we are both (sort of) in the same trade, I'm on the side of those who got wronged... those who are now trying to stick a knife in my back
I can understand people's I'm sure I'd be doing the exact same thing, but c'mon lets get real here... I never gave a stranger 20,000 pounds up front, or decided to go against everything I'd ever known by buying a house without a lawyer, or sign a biased agreement cos everyone else did, or not employ an engineer to oversee the key elements and instead go home and trust strangers to do it properly.
None of that in anyway, shape or form makes the buyer responsible for the wrongdoing, that's with the developer no question, but this slightly wreckless behaviour, mostly done out of greed/tightness from what I saw, undoubtedly helped facilitate an environment which enabled these people to flourish.
SJ
