This week we’ve been over in north-east Thailand. Bueng Kan to be specific. As you may have noted previously, this is where my wires family live. Mother, step-father and step-brother. But as she has grown up with her step-father from such a young age, we call him dad.
On our previous visit to Bueng Kan we talked about the possibility of investing in a latex farm. Our family are in the latex farming business, and the surrounding area is full of latex trees. We talked with the village elders, police, governors, and even some local loan sharks and mafia figures to get our head around the situation. We found one farm that was a perfect size and ticked most of our boxes. We were told it had 960 trees and was 12 Rai in size. One Rai is equivalent to 1,600 meters squared.
The farm was rectangular in shape and had a small concrete house in the corner, which the workers would live in. A farm this size would only require two workers. We had already planned this, Mos’ sister (Em) and her long-term boyfriend currently farm latex in the south of the country. Em is due to give birth in October and is planning to move closer to her family (in Bueng Kan) after she has. So it would be perfect for the three of them to live in this house with no commute and some peace and quite to bring up the baby.
We inspected the farm with our family and Mos’ dad did some digging to see if there are any issues with the land ownership, debts on the land and so on. We already knew that this land was still waiting for its title deed to be issued, so a sale was going to be largely done on trust rather than updating the official title-deed as you might expect. In addition to this we found out that the owner of the land had gambling issues and was being chased by his debtors, largely the local mafia. This is why he needed to sell. He had also borrowed money from a loan shark which he had secured on the land. All of this information was found by Mos’ dads contacts.
On this visit we spoke with the loan shark, who was surprisingly a very nice man. And a close friend of our family. He came to meet us and showed us all of the original land documents. The next day we spoke to the owner who said there are no debts on the land and that he had the original documents. We asked to see them, he showed us photocopies. We had our suspicions previously, but now we knew he was lying. We decided to walk away. Regardless of the legality of the sale, we did not want to do business with someone who we can’t trust, and is clearly dishonest.
This was fairly disappointing as we’d driven the 950 kilometres from Chiang Mai to Bueng Kan just to seal the deal. But, as I said, you can’t do business with liars. We had a nice meal with the family and got ready to head back to our hotel. As we were about to get in the car we got a phone call from a friend of Mos’ dad asking us if we were still looking for land. His friend was selling and it matched what we wanted.
We all jumped in the car and headed out to pick up this guy from the neighbouring village. Thankfully we’d hired a big 4×4 car this time, not a weedy little Honda Jazz. The roads in and around Bueng Kan are terrible, and that’s if they even exist. Sometimes you just have to drive through streams, farms, or gardens. It’s madness. And last time we very nearly crippled the Honda Jazz. I managed to get it to limp the journey back to Chiang Mai but I imagine it’s on the scrapheap by now. This time we had a Honda CVR G3. Much better.
The new farm was much closer to our families home than the previous one, only about ten minutes on a dirt bike or twenty in the 4×4. This farm does not have a house, but the close proximity to our families house would enable them all to share. We are all currently in the process of planning a new house to build as a replacement of the current very basic house. So planning for the addition of the sister, boyfriend and baby is not too difficult. Mos’ parents are also insisting on having a guest bedroom, with air-con and western style en-suite to enable my family to visit and stay with them.
The actual farm was perfect. Great location, good trees, which have already been cut, and cut well. And, it’s cheaper. It has no debts, issues or dishonest owners. In fact the owner is from southern Thailand so he spoke the same variant of Thai as Mos.
We will be heading back next week to buy the farm. We’re very excited.
Tom Mumford 