After eight-plus years and at least three ownerships REm has reached the 100 issues mark, writes John Davids.
As we say in our leader column on page 3 at times the going has been tough, especially recently, but we can see that things are improving.
Germany, France and Japan officially came out of recession last quarter and – even though the margins of improvement were very small – that has to be encouraging.
So we hope that the future looks a lot brighter because certainly the past 18 or so months have been a challenge.
REm managed to survive an especially rough time at the start of 2008 when then owner John Botting became seriously ill.
A super effort by the staff kept the magazine coming out and many loyal advertisers stuck with the magazine through literally “thin” times.
But John Botting, upon his return, felt unable to continue and the magazine he had taken over from issue 52 passed to the ownership of John Black, a Newcastle-born businessman who has previously spent many years of his career working in Saudi Arabia.

Don’t want to vegetate
John said at the time: “I want to be occupied during my time here in Thailand. I don’t want to just sit around in bars after games of golf and vegetate.”
So he opted to buy this magazine – just before one of the worst recessions on record impacted nearly every market across the world.
Does John wish he had opted to play more golf? Perhaps, that’s a question best posed after the coming high season. Several advertisers have been talking to us about returning to our columns for the season. So we hope that many of them are in a position to walk the talk and take us into the next century of issues in
fine fettle.
Since issue 88 John Black has been at the helm while the magazine has been given a new, fresher look. Is it an improvement on some of the cover designs that preceeded it seen above? We’ll let the readers be the judge.
We’ll also let you be the judge of whether we are producing a good magazine or not. That’s not for us to say but, obviously, we believe we are ... otherwise we shouldn’t continue in the business.

Best in the market
David Walton, of The Waterfront project, was good enough to say: “Without a shadow of a doubt the best property related magazine in the market. Best wishes for the next 100.”
That was kind of him.
Of course it would have been nice to be able to show you what the cover of the first issue looked like but all copies have been lost or destroyed. Indeed, we are only able to show you issue 50 as the start point. This is Thailand.
To sum up we would like to say thanks to all staff, writers, printers and customers who have helped us get this far. We couldn’t have done it without you! Ω