Some reasons not to undertake property development in Pattaya right now:

Civil unrest
A saturated housing market where nothing is selling
Obscene exchange rates

But I must be too pessimistic, because there are a rash of new developers spending money on posters, brochures and fancy sales offices, hoping to persuade punters to part with some cash; after which they may or may not start to build something.

Took she who must be obeyed to Starbucks in Central Beach Road a couple of days ago and discovered that a nearby unit had been converted to a swanky sales office for a development called The Koral.

Sticking the word “the” in front of a a random word is the latest trend from property developers, desperate to come up with a name which will hint at opulence and exclusivity. Naming a development “Crumbling Towers” doesn’t say much, but “The Crumbling Towers” tells the world that this is the special crumbling towers; out of all the crumbling towers on offer, this is the one. Utter bollocks of course.

Substituting a K for a C in a word is a currently cool (sorry, kurrently kool) thing to do; as in Mortal Kombat (computer game) and Korea (Editor: are you sure you have your facts right? If so, kool).

And so we have The Koral, which is already sufficient reason for not wanting to live there.

But the brochure was opulent; printed on thick, quality paper in full colour and stuffed with computer generated images, illustrating what The Koral will look like should they ever get round to building it. And with encouraging text written in English; sort of. It starts with “Millions of travelers from around the world know Pattaya as a city of vibrant.” No, I didn’t leave a word out; they did. And there is more. “Uniquely design for timeless style”. “As you step out the landscape is surrounded minimal tropical garden”. The lovely, expensive brochure, clearly designed for attracting English speaking customer, is grammatically buggered.

Why do they do this? How hard would it be to have the wording checked by a native English speaker before printing? For goodness sake, they could just walk up to someone and ask them to take a look.

Hello, do you speak English
Yeah. But. No. But. Yeah
Can you check our slogan please? It’s: “Luxury living in the beach lifestyle”.
Nah, that’s no good, innit. Wanna use “Buy this condo you fucker or we’ll come and burn the fucker down. Fucker”
Thank you for the correction. What’s your name by the way?
Jeff Savage, innit.

OK, so the name is crap and the brochure is flawed, but the actual show units were rather pleasant. Good use of space and the view out the front across beach road was OK. “I’ll take this one, I like the view”, I told the flustered sales girl. “No, no, no, you have to see real site” she said.

So I looked in the brochure, and this was the view:

koral

Very nice elevated view of Pattaya bay. Looks very similar to the view that you get from the lookout point at Pratumnak hill. Hang on; it IS the view you get from the lookout point at Pratumnak hill!

So we went to the lookout point to check the view, and indeed it was the same:

And this is the lookout point area, not enough space for a new development; hardly got space for another food cart:

And of course this is because the view in the brochure is a photoshopped lie.

The actual site is 10 kilometres away from where the photograph is taken, at a location which is more than three kilometres from the seafront. Maybe you will be able to catch a distant view of the sea from one of the higher units; but I doubt it; although the brochure states that you can have sea view, garden view, pool view or mountain view. But then, neither did I spot any mountains. Or a garden.

The good news is that development is only 2 minutes from Pattaya City Centre, according to the brochure. As Pattaya is about 15 kilometres away, this means they must be providing some sort of shuttle bus that can get there at an average of 450 kilometres an hour. Worth the price of investment just for that, I reckon.

Anyway, work seems to almost underway at the construction site:

So get yourself down to the sales office and agree to purchase several units, provided that they guarantee the view printed in their brochure; and that they change the name to The Kon.