In the mid ’80s Pattaya was almost exclusively a foreign tourist town. As I mentioned in my earlier article, the road from Bangkok was a nightmare and only the extremely brave or very stupid would attempt to drive from Bangkok to spend the weekend in Pattaya.
There were a few hardy expats that would make the journey down to the Royal Varuna Yacht Club but they had their own accommodation in the club or made use of the abundant and very cheap hotel accommodation.
In the mid-80s Thailand went through the first of the major infrastructure improvement projects that were to open up the country for tourism and investment. The first two major roads to be targeted in this development were Highway 1 to Chiang Mai and Highway 3 to Trad which conveniently passes through Pattaya.

One long building site
This by no means made the road or travel any easier. What it did was to turn the whole of the road between Pattaya and Bangkok into a building site.
In true Thailand road development fashion, different contractors started different parts of the road all at the same time.
Getting to Bangkok and the old Don Muang Airport was an absolute nightmare. The public busses refused to take you after midday for a midnight flight as there was a very good chance you would miss your departure time.
I left Pattaya eight hours ahead of my mother’s check-in time and she still missed her flight!
Trust me! She still won’t let me forget the incident.
While all of this was going on, a single Thai developer was quietly building Pattaya’ s first commercial condominium. There was no sales office in Pattaya, there were no signboards, there were no magazines or newspapers to advertise in, but it sold out in only a few months, all prior to completion and exclusively to Thai buyers.

Hidden away
The condominium is now called Garden Cliff 1 (originally only Garden Cliff of course) and is still hidden away on Wong -Amat Beach right at the very end of the road that passes by many of the huge condos built later on Wong-Amat.
The building is low rise, directly on the beach and has only 39 units. I believe that these units originally sold in the Bt 2-4m range which was an enormous amount of money when 1 US$ was fixed at 24.5 to the baht and the UK pound traded at about Bt 36 to 1 pound. When you look back at these exchange rates, it makes the current ones look almost acceptable!

Condo rush
The success of Garden Cliff started a small condo rush in Pattaya but, following on the example set by the Garden Cliff project, all of the developers targeted Bangkok Thai customers.
Strangely, the variety of the first developers was very wide. Siam Penthouse was built on Wong-Amat, Peak Condo and Khiang Talay were built on Pratumnak and the two buildings that in my opinion were the real forerunners of the Pattaya condo development were built on Jomtien.
My personal favourite and as far as I am concerned probably the building that set the standard for Pattaya condos is the Grand Condotel. With its 150 large units, set directly on what was then by far the best beach in the area it was the first to include a housing development leading out to the main road.
The houses were all 3-bedroom and the condos were mostly large units and the whole development was aimed at the ultra-rich of the day.

Tallest condo
The second of the two held the record for the tallest condo in Pattaya for a long time and is still (unless I have overlooked something) the tallest condo on Jomtien. Of course it is the Jomtien Metro.
The construction involved in this building was a massive undertaking for the day. They needed to produce their own concrete as they could not guarantee a supply large enough to keep the construction moving and due to the fact that the road along the beach was still a dirt track in places, everything had to come down from Sukhumvit.
This building on its own probably did more to develop Jomtien as a real tourist destination than any other in the south end of the beach.

Small units
Another thing that set this building aside from what had come before it was that it was full of small units. An amazing 550+ units mostly in a twin bedded format so a middle class family could use the unit as a weekend getaway.
What made this project a real ground-breaking one was that between Metro and Grand Condotel there was pretty much nothing. Villa Navin was there but there were no 7-11s, no supermarkets, no bars, and only two or three beachside restaurants.
People coming there brought their own supplies or lived on sticky rice, grilled chicken and som tam.
Another phenomenon of the Pattaya Real Estate boom was also being born during this time. Something that had never been seen before and something that was to have a huge impact on the growth of the City.
The first two real estate brokers were born ...
More on this next time.