I bought a house with my wife as a ‘forever’ home and to give myself room for my cars and bikes. I could probably have found a property I could negotiate areas to modify for paint and panel work but in the end I chose the path of least resistance and headaches and just bought.
My house was listed at 7mil, dropped to 6 as it had sat for 12 months and we then closed that deal at 5.
I used a highly recommended lawyer from a big firm (foreign owned and managed) and negotiated terms directly with the vendor.
Like you, as you know, I invest my money mostly elsewhere so I approached the vendor for a short term vendor mortgage which was agreed on. 3mil down, 1mil over 3 years at 2%, final payment 1mil (rough figured obviously) and kept my money working for me.
When it came to land transfer I stipulated that the chanote was to be transferred to my wife on down payment of the 3mil, the mortgage to be recorded on the back of the chanote (did my research), had my lawyers inspect the contracts drawn up by the vendor and attended the land department office with the vendor on the day of transfer. I left absolutely nothing up to anyone else or without my direct supervision
Everything went to plan, no hiccups or surprises. And as an added bonus, we’ll two actually. With the 1mil final payment swinging in the breeze the vendor approached me about 12 months into the mortgage period asking if they could access the final payment early to ‘upgrade machine’ at their factory.
A bit if back and forth and I managed to secure a further 235000฿ discount on the total cost of the property. A nice, cheeky return
Add to that I got in on the bottom floor at the start of the short lived lithium boom recently and paid the remainder out of the profits from a speculative Aussie lithium ‘miner’ (ASX:LKE)
So all in all for me a very positive experience. I was very involved in the whole process, I did my research and left nothing up to anyone else to ‘take care of’. It’s the only way to do things here
And like you, if it doesn’t work out with the wife I’ll probably just move on