Finding a Rental House in Chiang Mai

Renting a house in Chiang Mai is definitely easier than renting a house outside of a major city like Chiang Mai, such as in Lampang or Chiang Dao where we have worked previously.  At least in Chiang Mai there are a fair few real estate agents who have houses advertised on websites which you can look through and they can organise for you to look at.  That said, it is still not an easy process as we have experienced in the last couple of weeks. 

Firstly, even though there are hundreds of houses to search through in websites such as http://www.ddproperty.com/ we found that most of the houses we were interested in, when we inquired with the real estate agent, they were no longer available.  So I would have a short-list of 10 houses which were listed on the website, but when I called the real estate agent only 1 or 2 at most would still be available.  A lot of time was wasted considering houses which weren’t available in the first place. I think they leave houses on the website to entice people to make contact with the real estate agent. 

Secondly, although many landlords in Chiang Mai are using the services of real estate agents, a lot of houses still are advertised privately, by a “for rent” sign outside the house.  If you just relied on websites and real estate agents you would miss out on a lot of houses for rent.  Knowing that I spent a few days just driving through neighbourhoods street by street looking out for “for rent” signs. 

Red "For Rent" sign in front of a house (not our one but one of the many we went past)

Thirdly, we have a big family of 4 kids which is amazes most Thai and the majority of houses are built with only 3 bedrooms and small living areas which suits most people.  But we were looking for at least 4 bedrooms and a large living area, close to the kid’s school, close to a shopping centre, without a spirit house if possible, able to have a dog and which didn’t have too much furniture (majority of houses for rent in Chiang Mai are partially or fully furnished).

In the end, we had looked at over 20 houses with real estate agents and on our own for several weeks and had found a few places which we could live in but nothing which we felt was just right.  In the end, we gave ourselves just one more day to find a house and if nothing turned up we were going to take a house which was o.k, but was fully furnished and a smaller living area than we wanted.  On the last day, I was at immigration and met another missionary and he told me about two neighbourhoods they looked at when they were searching for houses.

After I had finished at immigration I went to these two neighbours and drove up and down every street looking for “for rent” signs.  Finally I found a sign and rang the owner and organised a time later that afternoon to see the house.  Once I went into the house, I realised that this could be “the house” and I quickly rang my wife and organise to pick her up and get her to see it while the landlord waited. 

The house fit with almost everything we were looking for and the landlord was more engaged and helpful than any other landlord we’ve dealt with.  They didn’t advertise their house on real estate websites because they wanted to be very selective about who rented their house and they had rejected a lot of previous people who had wanted to rent their house.  They immediately dropped the rent by 2,000 baht per month and when we told them that we liked the house but as Christians we wanted to pray about it overnight and get back to them the next day, they dropped the rent by another 500 baht per month because we were involved in helping religion. 

We are really thankful to God for the provision of this new house.