If your idea of building a house or villa in Thailand sounds like fun, this article on building a house in Thailand may help you. There are many facets to building a house from the building permit to the final construction. For the sake of keeping this not too long, we will assume you have already purchased you land and acquired a building permit.


There are several different building arrangements you can work out with builders in Phuket, Thailand. You can hire people to work for you and you pay them a daily wage. This pay as you go can work quite well but there are a few drawbacks. Usually the workers wont be moving at top productivity to stretch the job out longer. You may also find your costs can get out of control as you will not be able to calculate how long something will take. The other problem is you need to be around every day to make sure your not paying for people that are not showing up or not there.

Another variation of this theme is you for labor and buy your materials yourself. The foreman will give you a quote for the labor for whole job. Usually the builder will not include things like electric, pluming, doors and windows. You want to make sure what and what not is included in the price they give you. You also want to be able to pay them when they hit certain milestones during the construction process of your phuket house or villa.

A good variation one of my friends does is pay his builder a daily wage times the number of people he has working on your site. So for example if the builder has ten people on the site he pays his builder about one hundred fifty percent going rate for his labors but the builder has to be responsible for them. The contractor makes his money on the markup difference on what he pays his people and what he charges my friend.

You can also hire people to small jobs by the meter on what they call mow. This means you pay them for the work they do. This is common in painting and rendering crews where they know how long it will take them and you just buy the materials. The one thing you have to watch for here is they tend to waste materials when you hire them this way.

Paying the Phuket builder to do all the work is very common on the island also. I build a small bungalow this way about four years ago as a model unit. The one major thing to have to watch here is the builder will usually ask for a large down deposit and you will wait a long time for them to start your Phuket villa or house. Many builders keep the deposits of unsuspecting farung and you never get your money back even if you take them to court and win. Never trust builders too much and always have a start and finish date on your contract.

The last way I like to talk about is hiring your own crew and doing the work yourself with Thai laborers. One way to do this is hire a foreman who has contacts in Issan and can get five to ten workers to come down on the bus to work on your housing project. You will have to pay transportation and have to build housing for them. When the project is finished, they will take the bus back home.

In summary, there are many ways you can go about hiring a builder or Thai people to build your house for you in Phuket, Thailand. You can hire your own, hire and pay by day and or pay as you go. You can choose to work with a builder or building company or hire your own and build your own way. Building a house in Phuket Thailand can be a rewarding experience if you have the time to try it.