There’s a Canadian family in Plai Laem who arrived on the island in November the year before last with twelve suitcases between them, a sea-freight pallet that hadn’t yet cleared Bangkok customs, and a two-week plan to find a villa. They took six weeks. The two-week plan was based on advice from a friend of theirs in Vancouver who’d done the same move five years earlier and assured them it was easy.
They’d been to Samui once on a holiday in 2021 and liked it. He worked remotely as a software developer, she was a nurse who was planning to take a year off. Two boys, eight and eleven. They’d researched international schools online, narrowed it down to one near Bophut, and put their Toronto house up for rent rather than selling because they weren’t fully sure they’d stay. The sea-freight from Vancouver was a one-way pallet of stuff they couldn’t bear to leave: the eight-year-old’s bookshelf, the eleven-year-old’s drum kit, the wife’s grandmother’s china, several boxes of winter clothes they’d packed because they hadn’t worked out what else to do with them.
They came to me on day three. The first villa viewing had been scheduled for their second day. They’d seen photos of a four-bedroom in Bophut, twenty minutes from the school, garden, ocean glimpse, all within budget. The agent rang them while they were in the taxi heading there to say the landlord had decided to give the place to a different family who’d offered three months upfront. The agent had a few other places to suggest but none of them were what the family had been imagining. They needed somewhere for the sea-freight pallet, which was sitting at Donsak port, and somewhere for the bulk of their suitcases while they kept looking. We did a medium unit. They paid the first month upfront in cash because they hadn’t sorted Thai bank accounts yet.
The next three weeks went from bad to worse. Five planned viewings in week two, three of which the agents didn’t show up for. One that did was a scam, the photos were of a different building entirely. One was twice the size they wanted at the same price they’d budgeted, the kind of place a Hong Kong banker rents for the wet season, completely impractical for a family with school-age kids. The wife rang me from a cafe in Bophut in week three saying they’d made a terrible mistake and asking whether storage was cheaper in Vancouver.
What they hadn’t known was that the villas near the international school had been booked since June. Six months out. The school issued admission letters in May, parents from Hong Kong and Singapore booked their school-zone rentals immediately, and by November there was nothing left until October the following year. The friend in Vancouver had told them this was easy, but he’d done the move from a different angle, working remotely with no kids in school, and he’d had no constraints on which neighbourhood he ended up in.
Someone in a Facebook group suggested Plai Laem. They’d been writing it off as too far from the school, but Plai Laem is a 25-minute drive and there’s a school bus stop on the ring road that picks up at quarter past seven. They found a villa that fit. Four bedrooms, garden, decent enough kitchen, ocean view from the master bedroom. The lease started March 1st. They had until then to figure out the rest of life, but at least they had a date.
The hotel weeks had been rough by then. They’d booked a serviced apartment in Chaweng for the first two weeks, planning a soft landing. By the third week they’d moved to a cheaper place in Bophut to save money. By the fifth week they’d moved again to a longer-stay place in Bangrak. The boys were in the same bedroom at all three places. The eight-year-old was fine. The eleven-year-old started asking when they were going home, by which he meant Toronto. The wife developed a stress headache that lasted three weeks.
Their stuff stayed in our unit through December and most of January and February. They came in to fetch a few things along the way. The boys’ books one afternoon when both kids were climbing the walls in the hotel. The wife’s good pillows from the sea-freight pallet because the hotel ones were giving her neck pain. The eleven-year-old’s drum kit when he was missing it badly enough to start being difficult about everything else. He hadn’t played for two months by then and you could tell.
They moved into the Plai Laem villa on March 3rd. Both boys started at the international school the same week. The eight-year-old made a friend the first day and never looked back. The eleven-year-old took longer but settled in by Songkran. They’ve been there over a year now.
They’re not the only family who’ve found me this way. There’s a German family who arrived in October with two girls, planned a three-week search, took eight weeks, ended up in Maenam because they gave up on the Bophut school zone and chose a different international school instead. An English couple who arrived without kids and only stayed in our unit for nineteen days. A Russian family who came with grandparents and three generations of stuff, took ten weeks to find something that worked, and asked us at week six whether they could just live in the unit.
The wife from the Canadian family has become an unofficial advisor for other Canadian families considering the move. She has them on a list. She rings them back herself. She gives them three pieces of advice. The first is to plan for double the time they think it’ll take. The second is to budget for accommodation accordingly. The third is to come and see me about a unit before they get on the plane, not after.
What I’d Tell You If You’re Planning the Move to Samui
First thing: the two-week villa search is a fantasy. Even people who do this for a living, with local contacts and the language, take three to five weeks to land somewhere they actually want to stay. New arrivals with families and school constraints take six to twelve weeks. Plan accordingly. Budget for a serviced apartment for at least eight weeks. The cost of an extra month in temporary accommodation is less than the cost of grabbing the wrong villa in week three out of panic.
Second thing, and this is where I disagree with most arrivals advice: don’t sea-freight everything before you’ve signed a lease. The Canadian family had a pallet sitting at Donsak port that became a problem before it became a help. They couldn’t get into a villa, the pallet had to be released from customs into temporary storage, and the temporary storage option that actually works on Samui for sea-freight scale is us. Plenty of arrivals ship their stuff with a deadline assumption that turns out to be wrong. Either ship after you’ve signed the lease, or expect to need a unit for the gap. Buy what you need locally for the first two months and ship the rest later if it’s still worth shipping at all. Most of the winter clothes the Canadian family shipped have been in our unit ever since.
Third: when you do find the villa, get the move from storage to the new place done as one job. We do removals alongside the storage, which means the unit doesn’t get emptied piecemeal over several weekends while the family lives out of suitcases for another month. The Canadian family did the move in a single morning. Two pickups, six trips, the boys helping carry their own boxes. They were unpacked by dinner.
The wife rang me last week. They’re not moving but the eldest boy is going to a music camp in Chiang Mai this summer and they need somewhere to keep his drum kit and a few other things while he’s away. Our Samui storage is the same one she paid for in cash in November the year before last, when she’d been on the island three days and didn’t know yet whether she was staying. I told her any time. She said she’d drop the gear off on a Tuesday morning.
