Songkhla old-town shophouse

Songkhla is a proper Thai city with a beach attached, and it is one of the very few places in the country where a genuinely characterful old-town house near the sea costs less than a small car in Europe. The city curls around a lagoon on one side and the Gulf on the other, and its historic quarter — Nang Ngam and Nakhon Nai roads — is a preserved run of Sino-Portuguese shophouses in ochre, pistachio and faded blue, now filling up with coffee roasters, galleries and small guesthouses. Behind that, five minutes by scooter, is Samila beach and its famous bronze mermaid.

This property is a two-storey Sino-Thai townhouse of about ninety-five square metres on a lane between the old town and the beach road. Downstairs there is a long front room with the original tiled floor and shuttered timber windows, a rear kitchen and a bathroom; upstairs, two bedrooms and a second bathroom open onto a small balcony over the street. There is an internal light well — the classic shophouse device — that pulls air and daylight through the middle of the plan and keeps the house surprisingly cool. The structure is masonry with timber floors and joists upstairs, and a tiled roof.

The house has been lived in continuously and modernised piecemeal: new wiring in 2015, a functional if plain kitchen, one air-conditioning unit upstairs. The character elements — the shutters, the floor tiles, the staircase — survive and are the reason to buy it. The renovation opportunity is obvious and, in Songkhla, culturally encouraged: the municipality has actively supported the restoration of the old quarter, and sympathetically renovated shophouses here become cafés, studios and boutique stays. A budget of three to four hundred thousand baht would restore the joinery, upgrade both bathrooms and add a proper kitchen.

Samila beach runs for several kilometres of clean, pale sand backed by casuarina and coconut palms, with the Cat and Mouse islands offshore and Khao Tang Kuan hill rising behind the city. It is a strolling, kite-flying, sunset-and-seafood beach rather than a resort strip: Thai families picnic on mats under the trees, vendors sell grilled squid and fresh coconuts, and the water is calm from March to October. Further north, the long spit towards Sathing Phra offers empty sand for kilometres.

Songkhla's real advantage is that it is a functioning city of a quarter of a million people, with the sea in it. There are two large hospitals including the highly regarded Songklanagarind University Hospital, several malls in adjacent Hat Yai, a university, a fresh seafood market at the fishing port, and a food culture that mixes Thai, Chinese and Malay influences — this is the region for khao yam rice salad, roti, laksa-adjacent curries and outstanding dim sum. Hat Yai, thirty minutes inland, is the commercial capital of southern Thailand with everything a large city provides.

Transport is strong. Hat Yai International Airport is about forty-five minutes away and has direct flights to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore among others — this is a border region, and Malaysia's Penang is a four-hour drive. The southern railway serves Hat Yai with sleepers to Bangkok, and buses run everywhere. Within Songkhla, songthaews and motorbike taxis are the norm and cost almost nothing.

The ownership structure is the Thai standard: land cannot be held by a foreign individual, so buyers use a thirty-year registered lease with renewals or a Thai company. With an older masonry building, add a structural survey to the usual checks — timber floors and roof frames in a hundred-year-old shophouse deserve inspection for termite and water damage. Have your lawyer confirm the title deed, party wall arrangements with the neighbouring shophouses and any conservation-area consent requirements before restoration works.

One honest caveat: Songkhla province is on the northern edge of Thailand's deep south, and some foreign governments issue travel advice for the three provinces further south (Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat). Songkhla city itself is not part of that area, is peaceful, and functions as a normal university and commercial city, but a buyer should read the current advisories, visit in person and form their own view — as they should anywhere.

What you get for the money is genuinely unusual: a historic, characterful house in a walkable old town, with a broad city beach five minutes away, world-class cheap food, an international airport within an hour, and a purchase price that in most of coastal Thailand would buy a plain concrete box on a housing estate.