Finding your dream house to rent is undoubtedly the most difficult step, unless you personally know someone looking to rent out a property and the deal drops in your lap.
For me, it was four months of searching. Every single Sunday was spent trawling around moobarn after moobarn. Whereas searching for an apartment is a simple case of walking up and down sois and looking for tall buildings, moobarns can’t ideally be covered on foot – you’ll be one step ahead if you have a Thai friend who can assist you in the search. Preferably a friend with four wheels!
To give you a little more help, there is a terrific property magazine called ‘Baan La Tee Din’ – it’s easily the most popular property mag in Thailand and it’s choc-full of apartments and houses for rent and for sale. Unfortunately the magazine is in Thai so once more it’s your Thai friend to the rescue. Circle a few possibilities, telephone and make appointments to view, and then hit the streets.
As you drive around the moobarns, you’ll often see adverts for houses tacked onto telegraph poles. Take a pen and paper with you and jot a few phone numbers down. Call the owners on a mobile phone and make an appointment to view while you’re in the area.
Be prepared for disappointment! House-owners are often fickle and indecisive. I found a superb house down a private soi off Phattanakarn Road for which the owner wanted 5,000 baht a month. It needed a fair amount of work doing on it (re-tiled floors, air-con installation) but I could see the potential and for a modest outlay I could turn it into a palace. After the owner and I shook hands on the deal, I went out to buy furniture, fans and a refrigerator, only for the owner to call me up three days before I was to move in and tell me she’d decided to rent the house to her sister.
I’d virtually given up hope of ever finding the kind of place I was looking for. My prime goal was the kind of house where I could attract middle-class private students and charge them the earth.
I decided to have one more drive around Moobarn Seri on Rama 9 Road – a moobarn I’d driven around several times before. Noticing a very fine house with a ‘for rent’ sign on the front gate, I rang the bell and was greeted by the owner. She gave me the quick dime tour, and while the house was very nice and I could certainly see myself relaxing on the porch with a large gin and tonic, the asking price of 15,000 baht a month was way out of my budget. Seeing my disappointment, she told me about another house she owned located just a few sois away (she actually owns six houses I later found out) She got into the car, took me down to the house in question and as soon as I saw it I knew it was home. Five years later, and I’m still there. 9,000 baht a month and the rent hasn’t increased in all that time. I’ve taught English to most members of the family and gone out for numerous meals with them. Never be ashamed to suck up to the landlord and landlady.
Slightly off topic, but house-hunting gives you an incredible opportunity to peek inside the lives of middle-class Thais and their ‘surface-wealth’ existence. You’ll roll up at places with a couple of brand spanking new Mercedes Benzes on the drive-way and then once invited into the living room, you’ll be surrounded by more plastic than all the false legs in Sarajevo.
It’s crucial to remain as impartial as possible during a house inspection. House-owners (often Thai families still living there) always make you very welcome. There’s always a couple of kids to admire and perhaps even a golden retriever to fuss over. It’s easy to be sucked in by elaborate stories of wonderful neighborhoods and statements like ‘we’ve been very happy here’ (then pray tell why are you moving?) I find it very easy to visualize how I could make an apartment look when it’s nothing but an empty shell, but in a family home with endless rooms of wall-to-wall junk, it’s a lot more difficult. 
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