Hanoi: House sold for $5.75 million

hanois real estate company, Luxury Home Holdings, sold a $5 million house to a man who said the home was in need of major repairs and was not worth the $9.8 million price tag. 

The purchase price was  $6.2 million, The Bangkok Post reported.

Luxurious Home Holdings is based in the western city of Pattaya, which is about 250 kilometres north of the capital.

Owner, Thongsai Wai , was seeking a fixer-upper home to live in for a third time.

«If you had told me six years ago that I was about to buy an old and dilapidated house in the south of Thailand, I would have expected something even bigger,» Wai told The Hindu.

«This was a dream.

We couldn’t believe the house was worth $5million.»

On Friday, Hanois property department said it canceled a contract with the buyer.

The house is part of a large property portfolio that includes several multi-million dollar condominiums, and was only listed at an undisclosed price.

On the day of the sale, the city government and police also made an official public appeal for help to solve the housing crisis.

This was the only block in the city with no affordable housing, said Thongshen Tsek, a spokesperson for the city’s housing department.

He said the number of homeless people living rough has skyrocketed over the past decade.

But, for some, the challenge of finding new housing was more difficult because the price tag was too high.

The problem is that most of the vacant land is located in areas with very high levels of pollution,» said Chinta Chumkawat, a co-owner of the property.

A family of four had been living in a hotel in the northern city of Phnom Penh since 2008 when the area had become a dumping ground for discarded garbage.

They now have their own house in Phnom Padhan (Photo by Thongsaeng Mihail/The Hindu) The family, which includes three children, had been forced to move into a hotel because of the pollution from nearby industrial sites.

It was recently made official that pollution in the country’s capital was worse than it has been in decades in the form of industrial waste.

Cases of people living in hotels have become a public health concern due to the presence of harmful substances such as lead and other heavy metals in the drinking water and food.

In September, Thongsai told The Hindu that he would sell his house for a modest sum of $1.25 million, which he said was the price he was willing to pay to help alleviate the crisis.

He said he will now start rebuilding the family home and will also renovate several other properties.

Last year, the Thai government launched a «family buy» programme, aiming to raise at least a 10% increase in housing prices by 2020.

Thongsukh Thaymam, the head of Hanoi’s development bureau, said he was glad to hear the new house had been sold.»

If the buyer can live up to our expectations, there would be a lot of people interested in buying properties,» Thaympan said.

 It is estimated that the total price of residential real estate in Hatoi is about $6 trillion and the country has 1.5 million apartment flats.