Harry Nicolaides' Weekly Column

Exclusively for Phuket-Info.com

Fools gold

There is a development boom currently underway on the island of Phuket. Phuket has increasingly become the lifestyle destination of the rich and famous replacing traditional resort destinations like the Caribbean, Canary Islands and the south of France. Great swathes of the west coast have been bought by international consortiums with a view to construct swanky resort hotels and landscaped villa estates. Private property developers invest in clearing forbidding escarpments and laying infrastructure to allow for the construction of majestic Thai-styled bungalows thrust onto the side of mountains like monumental teak-wooded tree houses soaring above the verdant foliage.

Singaporean investors and Hong Kong speculators capitalize on the back of the languishing Thai baht and buy and sell land and homes with unrestrained cupidity. Local real estate agents raise the stakes with unspooled sales spiels about unprecedented investment returns from buying land or villas that will undergo vaulting growth in value over the next few years. Prospective international buyers are encouraged to rush down to Phuket to claim their stake in an investment bonanza that has been compared with the Californian gold rush of last century. In this carnival of greed even fools find gold.

I felt a little foolish when I entered the offices of Phuket’s largest real estate agent. I had no experience in selling houses or land and yet there I was engaged to train the Thai staff to use English more effectively as sales agents. They say you can generally estimate the fees or commission charged by a company by the type of coffee it serves. If the coffee is the finest quality, as corollary, the fees charged will be nauseatingly high. Seated at a magnificent mahogany conference table festooned with yachting and lifestyle magazines I was served such a cup of coffee.

In the curling wisp of steam that swirled upwards I saw visions of sweaty, dark-skinned workers carrying huge baskets of coffee beans across the sun-drenched fields of the Colombian lowlands. I could smell the burnished aroma of coffee freshly-grounded in clay pots made from fire and earth and water. This coffee was expensive indeed I thought until I saw the sugar. Like raw, uncut diamonds each unrefined brown granule that poured out of my teaspoon crashed into the pool of black, velvety coffee with a succession of nuggety pings. This was a connoisseur’s finest blend and served in a fine bone china cup and saucer with a sterling silver, hallmarked spoon. It was immediately clear to me that this was not the instant coffee that was made available to long suffering teachers in the kitchen at the language school in town.

My brief as the English teacher was to empower the Thai staff with the requisite English skills and vocabulary to maximize sales from the enquires received by phone, email and in person from foreign buyers. Included in the lessons were exercises with prepositions of place – above, below, next to, beside, inside, across, around - and of course, giving directions . Being able to describe the orientation of a property and its proximity to infrastructure such as roads, ports and the airport was viewed as equally important. Moreover, the director of the company stressed that each employee should, at the conclusion of the three-month course, be able to use adjectives to characterize the properties sympathetically. Being conversant with closing a sale contract or the value of property as an investment vehicle compared with the international money markets or fixed interest-bearing alternatives was not required.

As the lessons progressed – three lessons per week of one hour duration - the staff would bring emails to class that they had prepared as responses to unsolicited esquires made by prospective international buyers. Some of these were from buyers who lived in the United Kingdom, United States and Europe who planned to retire in Phuket or buy property for investment. The responses the Thai staff sent back to these emailed enquires were perfunctory as they were low level communications usually supplying more information or introductions to the senior native English speaking staff who consummated the sales. I started to teach the Thai staff the value of establishing a rapport with these prospective buyers with a measure of bluster and ballyhoo too. Eventually the staff were capable to write with considerable force and finesse, crafting compelling sales propositions.

With a skilled surrogate sales force, the perfunctory enquires were soon transformed into formal expressions of interest in buying a property. A legion of emails stacked high, like buddles of American dollars, were given to me for proof reading by my students. These emails from cashed-up buyers who had decided to purchase land or villas in Phuket had given me an idea. It was the perfect crime. Read and review incoming emails from buyers and identify the prospects who were close to buying. Glean their personal details from the emails and pass the information onto a friend in a rival real estate company. My friend presents them with a more attractive sale and hijacks the client. If the sale is successful my friend presents me with a substantial sales commission. Perfect!

This worked well for the last month of the course with a few low yielding sales concluded. When the company directors were on holiday one of the sales girls asked me to edit an email responding to an inquiry from a gentleman who signed Lord Baker. Normally, this inquiry would be handled only by the directors. I learned later that only enquires involving property worth less than $US 100,000 would be left to the junior Thai sales staff while anything greater in value would be handled by the directors personally. I performed an internet search using Google on Lord Baker.

Eureka! I had struck the mother lode of real estate buyers. Lord Baker was an American billionaire who Forbes magazine described as an internet mega-mogul and modern Medici who was engineering a renaissance of mass marketing using massive data bases of people. He was interested in buying a $US 30,000,000 villa with its own private cove. I called my friend and sent him the information. He made contact with Lord Baker who agreed to meet him on his subsequent visit to Phuket. We named him the ‘Welcome Stranger’ – also the name of the largest gold nugget ever found in the world).

Harry Nicolaides

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