Why a mid-sized estate agency in Pattaya is the one you want when things go wrong

When a property deal goes well, it barely matters who your agent was. The keys change hands, everyone shakes hands and the estate agency in Pattaya you chose looks like a good choice whoever it was. You only find out what you really bought when something goes wrong.

I own Alan Bolton Property Consultants, and I have come to believe that the size of an agency matters more than most people think. Not because bigger is better or smaller is friendlier, but because of what each size can and cannot do on the day there is a problem.

What "going wrong" looks like

Most problems in property are not dramatic. They are ordinary and irritating:

• A deposit that should have been returned and has not been.
• An air conditioner that was promised as working and is not.
• A transfer date that slips because one document is missing.
• A tenant and a landlord who each remember the agreement differently.
• A mistake by one of our own people. It happens, and I would rather say so.

None of these makes the news. All of them matter a great deal to the person in the middle of it. And every one of them comes down to the same two questions. Does anyone at the agency care enough to deal with it? And can the agency afford to put it right?

The one-person agent: cares, but cannot always pay

Pattaya has many agents working alone, and some of them are very good at what they do. A good solo agent will often care more than anyone, because their name is all they have.

The weakness is simple. A one-person business lives from commission to commission. If something goes wrong and it will cost 30,000 baht to fix, that may be most of what they earned on the deal. When the money has already been spent, good intentions do not go far. There is also nobody to cover when they are ill, travelling or simply out of their depth, and nobody above them to complain to.

The big operation: can pay, but who decides?

At the other end are the large agencies and the international franchises. They have systems, legal departments and brand names. They can certainly afford to fix a problem.

The difficulty is finding someone who will decide to. The agent who looked after you may have moved on. The branch manager needs approval. The person who could approve it has never heard of you, and to them you are a file. Large organisations are built to follow a process, and a process is slow exactly when you need speed.

The middle: big enough to pay, small enough to care

This is where I think an agency of our size has a real advantage, and it is the reason I am comfortable running one.

We make enough money to fix a problem from our own pocket if we need to. Sometimes a dispute is not clearly anyone's fault. Sometimes it is ours. Sometimes the amount involved is small compared with the damage that a long argument would do to everyone. In those cases a healthy business can simply decide to pay and move on. A business that is short of money cannot make that decision, however decent its owner is.

We are small enough that the decision reaches the owner. If a problem at Alan Bolton cannot be settled by the agent or the manager, it lands on my desk. Not in a head office in another country. I live in Pattaya, I have been in Thailand for over twenty years, and you can find me. That concentrates the mind in a way no complaints procedure can.

We have something to lose. This agency has been in Pattaya since 1978. A reputation that took that long to build can be damaged by one badly handled problem, and I am not willing to be the owner who lets that happen over a sum we can afford.

What I am not promising

I want to be careful here, because this is easy to oversell.

An agent is a middleman. We do not own the property, we do not hold the landlord's bank account, and we cannot force a buyer, seller, landlord or tenant to do something they have decided not to do. I wrote about that in more detail in what a Pattaya agency can and cannot control.

Nor do we pay out every time someone is unhappy. If a tenant has damaged a property, the tenant should pay for it. If a seller changes their mind, that is their right.

What I am saying is narrower, and I think more useful. When there is a problem, somebody senior here will look at it properly, will tell you honestly whose problem it is, and has both the authority and the means to resolve it where it is ours to resolve.

Questions worth asking any agency

Before you sign with anyone, including us, ask:

1. Who owns the business, and do they live here?
2. If something goes wrong after the deal, who do I speak to?
3. How long has the agency been trading under this name?
4. Do you have an office I can walk into?
5. Can you tell me about a time a deal went wrong and what you did?

The last question is the telling one. An agency that claims nothing has ever gone wrong is either very new or not being straight with you. There is more on this in our guide to how to choose an estate agent in Pattaya.

In short

Choose your agent for the bad day, not the good one. On a good day anybody will do. On a bad day you want an agency with enough behind it to put things right and an owner close enough to care that it does.

If you would like to talk to us about buying, selling or renting, get in touch or browse our current listings.