Wix Site

Occupational hazard: while we spent six months choosing a flat in Bangkok, I looked at hundreds of listing pages less as a buyer and more as someone who builds sites for a living. The difference between a useful page and a pretty one turned out to be simple. A useful one answers three things in five seconds: which district, how many square metres, which way the windows face. A pretty one opens with a sunset panorama and hides the district in a caption under the eighth photograph. Standing in a queue with my phone, I could get through a dozen addresses only on the sites where the top of the page did its job. We ended up staying on https://thailand-real.estate/ and worked the whole shortlist without keeping notes on the side. Does anyone else catch themselves auditing someone else's markup in the middle of a personal decision?

We started the way I think most people start: eleven tabs open, three favourites, and a vague feeling that we would know the right place when we saw it.

Four months later the favourites had rotated twice and we had not moved a step closer, so I did the boring thing and opened a spreadsheet. One row per property, and columns for the things that actually changed our mind rather than the things that photograph well: how far the nearest bus stop is, whether the building has a lift, which way the main room faces in the afternoon, how many stairs from the street to the door, and whether the kitchen window looks at a wall.

The listings I track come from https://global-property.investments/ and I paste in the address together with my own notes rather than the description, because I want to remember why a place stayed on the list…